Boeing staff gather on a picket line near the doorway to a Boeing facility during an ongoing strike on October 24, 2024 in Seattle, Washington.
David Ryder | Getty Images
Boeing‘s greater than seven-week machinist strike is ready to hit Friday’s U.S. jobs report — the last one which can be released before Nov. 5 presidential election and the Federal Reserve’s meeting next week. The corporate’s impending job cuts, meanwhile, will take months more to point out up.
Some 44,000 U.S. staff were on strike when the Labor Department conducted its survey in mid-October. About 33,000 of them are Boeing machinists, who walked off the job on Sept. 13 after overwhelmingly voting against a union-endorsed labor contract and in favor of their first strike since 2008.
Economists expect the U.S. to have added 100,000 jobs in October. Bank of America this week forecast that payroll tallies can be a minimum of 50,000 lower than they might have otherwise been due to the strikes and affects of each Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said in an Oct. 14 speech that those aspects could have a 100,000-job impact on the October report and called the reductions a “significant but temporary lack of jobs.” He said they “can have a small effect on the unemployment rate, but I’m undecided it can be that visible.”
Boeing’s machinist strike has complicated the plane maker’s already difficult position as its latest CEO, Kelly Ortberg, tries to steer the enormous U.S. manufacturer and exporter out of safety, quality and financial crises. The unionized machinists, mostly within the Seattle area, voted 64% against a latest proposal last week, which included 35% wage increases, compared with a 25% wage hike in an earlier tentative agreement.
In an aerial view, a Boeing 737 Max fuselage is seen on a railcar during an ongoing strike by Boeing factory staff in Seattle on Oct. 24, 2024.
David Ryder | Getty Images
The Biden administration has gotten involved, urging the 2 sides to achieve a deal.
“With the continued assistance of Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, your Union bargaining committee had a productive face-to-face meeting with the corporate to handle key bargaining issues,” the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Employees District 751 said late Tuesday.
Su had met with each side before the last proposal was dropped at a vote on Oct. 23.
Boeing’s impact on U.S. employment numbers is ready to proceed. CEO Ortberg said earlier this month that the corporate will cut 10% of its global workforce, or 17,000 people, though job-loss warning letters aren’t expected to exit until mid-November.
Ortberg, who took over as CEO in early August, said Boeing must turn out to be leaner and concentrate on its core businesses.
“One in all the things I’ve heard from a variety of employees is there’s just an excessive amount of overhead. It slows them down in having the ability to get their work done,” he said on an Oct. 23 quarterly call. “So we’re going to actually focus this workforce reduction in streamlining those overhead activities, consolidating things that might be consolidated.”
Layoffs and their announcements are more complicated to factor into federal employment surveys than strikes because “we haven’t got a very good sense of after they occur,” noted Bank of America economist Stephen Juneau.
The impact of Boeing’s strike may lead to further cuts in the delicate aerospace supply chain.
Boeing fuselage maker Spirit AeroSystems earlier this week put about 700 Wichita, Kansas, staff on a 21-day furlough. A spokesman for the corporate, which Boeing is within the means of acquiring, told CNBC last week that Spirit is considering tons of of additional furloughs or layoffs if the Boeing strike lasts past Nov. 25.
