McDonnell Facility Hit by a 1-Day Walkout to Protest Contract Offer

About 1,700 of the 6,000 employees at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Huntington Beach staged a one-day walkout Monday to protest the company’s contract offer.

There were no incidents or demonstrations at the plant at 5301 Bolsa Chica St., company officials said, and the facility remained open.

Mike Smith, president of District 720 of the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said about 85% of the 2,000 union members at the Huntington Beach plant took part in the walkout.

All of the union workers are expected to return to work today, he said.

The union’s employees also walked off from the McDonnell Douglas plant in Torrance, and that facility remained open as well, said David Eastman, a company spokesman.

At issue in the dispute are negotiations for a new three-year contract. The union’s last contract with the huge aerospace and defense concern expired in October.

Smith said the union is unhappy because McDonnell Douglas is proposing that employees pay an increased part of their health insurance benefits and because the company didn’t offer a wage increase for the third year of the proposed new contract.

The contract would offer the union employees a 3% wage increase and a 3% one-time, lump-sum payment the first year; a 2% wage increase and 2% lump-sum payment the second year and no wage increase but a 4% lump-sum payment in the third year. The first year of the contract would offer a 6-cent-per-hour wage hike in addition to the 3% general wage increase.

“We think this is the finest package offered in bargaining by anyone in the aerospace industry,” Eastman said.

But Smith, in a separate interview, said the union doesn’t think the offer meets members’ needs. He also said the membership wasn’t ready to vote on the proposal.

Vote by Saturday

“They made that offer last Monday (Feb. 9) and demanded that we vote on it by Saturday,” Smith said. “There’s no way we could have voted on it by then. This walkout was to show we’re ready to negotiate and address the issues.”

Smith said there were no demonstrations at the Huntington Beach and Torrance plants “because we didn’t call for picketing or demonstrations. . . . We just asked our workers not to show up and not to come to work today (Monday).”

Eastman said work proceeded at both plants on Monday despite the walkout. “Obviously not as much work is done when that proportion of your work force is gone,” he said. “Basically we would have preferred that the union had had a vote (on the proposed contract) instead of a walkout. We think the indications in the plants are that the employees just want to settle and get this behind them.”