Ticker: Strike at Boeing over; Amazon employees challenge return to office
Factory workers at Boeing have voted to accept a contract offer and end their strike after more than seven weeks, clearing the way for the company to restart idled Pacific Northwest assembly lines.
Boeing’s 33,000 striking machinists disbanded their picket lines late Monday after leaders of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers district in Seattle said 59% of union members who cast ballots agreed to approve the company’s fourth formal offer, which included a 38% wage increase over four years.
Union machinists assemble the 737 Max, Boeing’s bestselling airliner, along with the 777 or “triple-seven” jet and the 767 cargo plane at factories in Renton and Everett, Washington. Resuming production will allow Boeing to generate much-needed cash, which it has been bleeding.
The union said its workers can return to work as soon as Wednesday or as late as Nov. 12.
Amazon employees challenge return to office
More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January.
In a letter sent to Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman last Wednesday, 523 employees protested the upcoming return-to-office mandate and urged Amazon executives to restore the flexibility of remote work.
“By taking this action, AWS is not living up to its full potential and is creating a bleak outlook for its future,” read the letter shared with The Seattle Times. “While it is absolutely true that there are challenges with flexible and remote work, we have always been a company that solves problems in new, exciting and innovative ways, rather than relying on antiquated approaches that happened to work well some time in the past.