Aircraft Workers Vote to Keep SPEEA union after IBEW, SPEEA and IAM agree to cuts

Aircraft Workers Decide to Keep Union

Thu Aug 18, 1:26 AM ET

Aircraft workers voted Wednesday to keep their union, which agreed to benefit cuts after a Canadian company bought the Boeing Co.'s commercial airplane operations in Kansas and Oklahoma.

During polling Wednesday, 58 percent of employees who voted chose to recertify the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, with a final count of 829 to 602. The union narrowly survived a previous attempt to end its representation in February 2004.

Only the union's technical workers at Spirit Aerosystems asked for the election, which did not affect SPEEA's engineering unit at the plant. SPEEA represents 4,660 employees in Wichita at Spirit and at Boeing's remaining military operations in Wichita.

Onex Corp.'s aerospace subsidiary, recently renamed Spirit Aerosystems Inc., won pay and benefit cuts from its biggest union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers after it bought the former Boeing commercial operations here.

SPEEA, the company's second-largest union, also approved benefit cuts coupled with wage increases for its two negotiating units.

Heidi Foltz, one of the leaders of the decertification effort, has said one reason workers wanted another decertification effort was because they now work for a different company and have a chance to establish a new relationship with the management at Spirit.

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