Aircraft assembly workers at Boeing factories near Seattle and elsewhere voted to end a seven-week strike overnight.
Leaders of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers district in Seattle said 59 of members who cast ballots agreed to approve the company's fourth formal offer and the third put to a vote.
Organized labor has made itself heard over the past couple of years, and the number of actions taken by unions has soared. There were 470 work stoppages 466 strikes and four lockouts involving approximately 539,000 workers last year, according to Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The nearly 500 work stoppages resulted in approximately 24,874,522 strike days.
While the number of work stoppages increased by only 9 between 2022 and 2023, the number of workers involved in those work stoppages skyrocketed 141 to well over a half million workers, according to Cornell.
Unions including the UAW, the Teamsters and, most recently, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, say they made the sacrifices asked of them by their companies during the pandemic and previous periods of distress for different economic sectors. Workers have stood firm on demands of late, however, saying that now is the time for companies, which have been consistently posting billions of dollars in profits every year, to catch up and pay workers what they are owed.
