Boeing Engineers Decertify Their Union
In a blow to organized labor, Boeing Co. engineers in Southern California voted Friday to kick out their union after years of bitter internal feuding.
The decertification shuts down the small 56-year-old Southern California Professional Engineering Assn., which represented about 4,300 engineers at Boeing facilities in Huntington Beach, Long Beach and satellite locations.
“The union is no longer in existence and the contract is void,” said the union’s chairman, B.T. Klein, an electrical engineer. “It’s disappointing. This is the end of an old and proud institution.”
National Labor Relations Board officials said the vote of 1,677 to 1,237 to decertify was one of the largest of its kind in decades. In 1998, more than 1,000 engineers at Lockheed-Martin Corp. in Palmdale voted narrowly to decertify their union, the Engineers and Scientists Guild.
The loss is expected to hurt organized labor by undercutting its argument that white-collar professionals can benefit from union membership.
Friday’s ballot count at the labor relations board’s offices in Los Angeles capped an emotional two-year feud that began when officers of the small SCPEA decided to affiliate with a larger national union, hoping to gain resources and bargaining clout.
After a search, two likely national unions emerged as candidates, and both were eager to take on the job.
But officers and members were split over the choice. In the end, top officers went with the 140,000-member Office and Professional Employees International Union, alienating backers of the rival union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace.
That split spawned lawsuits, unfair labor practice charges, competing Web sites, appeals to the AFL-CIO and, finally, the decertification petition. Supporters of SPEEA were joined by engineers who opposed any union and encouraged by Boeing management.
“We had the perfect storm,” said Kevin Kistler, OPEIU’s organizing director, who was recently named trustee for the local to try to build support before the vote.
Kistler said the union would review the results this weekend and decide whether to file an objection to the balloting. If not, he said, it would stay in touch with supporters and consider filing for a new election in a year.
“It’s not a good day,” he said, “but it’s not the last day either.”
Others said it was unlikely that Boeing engineers in Southern California would ever again support a union. They noted that only about one-fourth of the 4,300 engineers covered by the contract paid union dues even in the best of times. Now, after two years of bickering, that support would be even smaller.
“What we saw here was a blatant subversion of the democratic process,” said Richard “Chip” Terracina, a SPEEA supporter who said he tried to “work within the union system” but eventually filed the decertification petition in frustration. “What we’ve always said is they’ve got to listen to the will of the membership. They never did that, and this is the outcome.”
Boeing chief counsel William Hartman was thrilled by the outcome. He emphasized that the company was not actively involved in the decertification process, saying that “we’ve always expressed a preference to deal with our employees directly.”
The Southern California Professional Engineering Assn. was created in 1945 by engineers at Douglas Aircraft Co., which through a merger later became McDonnell Douglas. The company was acquired by Boeing in 1996.
