BOEING IN THE NEWS
When SPEEA went on strike Boeing C.E.O. Phil Conte said he felt the
workers' pain because they were losing $3.5 million dollars a week. That
might seem like a big loss. It has been 1 2 weeks at this writing, so the
loss mounts to 1 2 times that much, which is a much larger loss, of
course. So why don't the Boeing technical and engineering workers throw
away their picket signs and go back to earning that $3.5 mil?
The answer is that losing their demands mounts up to a much greater
loss. That is because the loss of a raise is a loss that goes on forever.
For instance, suppose they were asking a dollar an hour and lose. That
means their next round of negotiations start at a dollar less than if they
had won a dollar the first time around. Since it is unlikely, having lost
the first time, they will be able to demand an extra dollar the next
round. The loss is forever.
If you take that lost forever dollar and figure it at accumulated
compound interest forever we can see that billions. of dollars have been
lost through labor's lost negotiations. That loss would more than cover
Bill Gate's one hundred billion plus personal fortune and quite possibly
many other fortunes built up since the end of the Civil War in 1865
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