SPEEA members approve Boeing contracts

The white-collar engineering union at Boeing accepted the company's contract offers Monday.

The result ensures Boeing four years of labor peace as it sorts out its production woes and prepares for an aviation down-cycle.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) represents about 14,000 engineers and an additional 7,000 technical staff. The two groups voted separately on similar contracts that will raise salaries an average 5 percent each year of the four-year contract.

Ballots counted Monday night showed that 79 percent of the engineers voted in favor of their contract. In the separate vote by the technical staff, the narrower majority was at 69 percent in favor.

The two SPEEA contracts require the company to consult with the union before outsourcing any work currently done by SPEEA members or giving such work to nonunion contract engineers. They do not curtail Boeing's ability to outsource design work on future airplane projects.

SPEEA members will get a pension increase equal to the one Boeing gave to the Machinists at the end of their recent two-month strike.

Their employee medical benefit contributions will increase modestly.

The contracts were recommended by union officials and will run four years rather than the usual three, through Oct. 6, 2012. They apply to the Puget Sound region technical workforce and to a few hundred SPEEA-represented employees in Oregon, Utah and California.

The salary boost for any individual SPEEA member will range from 2 percent per year to 8 percent or even higher.

The new contracts create a pool of money for salary increases that is shared among employees based on performance evaluations. Engineers are guaranteed at least 2 percent each year and technical staff at least 2.5 percent. But some will get much more so that the average is 5 percent.

An additional pool of money, averaging 0.5 percent of annual salary, is available each year to pay people promoted.

Under the current contracts, engineers earn on average almost $89,000 a year in base salary, and technical staff average about $67,000, according to SPEEA.

Overtime and incentive pay increase those averages to $108,000 and $82,000, respectively, according to Boeing.

The SPEEA technical staff include drafters, who create 3-D engineering models on computers; manufacturing planners, who take an engineering design, figure out the sequence of parts to be built and come up with a plan to be used in the factory; lab technicians and analysts, who calibrate equipment for testing or manage data; and technical writers, who produce technical manuals for internal and for customer use.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com