Boeing machinists vote to strike after rejecting 25% pay raise over 4 years

Machinists at Boeing voted Thursday to go on strike, another setback for the giant aircraft maker whose reputation and finances have been battered and now faces a shutdown in production of its best-selling airline planes.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said its members rejected a contract that would have raised pay 25 per cent over four years, then voted 94.6 per cent to reject the contract and voted 96 per cent to strike. A two-thirds vote among 33,000 workers was needed to strike.

Very little has gone right for Boeing this year, from a panel blowing out and leaving a gaping hole in one of its passenger jets in January to NASA leaving two astronauts in space rather sending them home on a problem-plagued Boeing spacecraft.

As long as the strike lasts, it will deprive Boeing of much-needed cash that it gets from delivering new planes to airlines. That will be another challenge for new CEO Kelly Ortberg, who six weeks ago was given the job of turning around a company that has lost more than $25 billion in the last six years and fallen behind European rival Airbus.

Ortberg warned machinists that a strike vote would put Boeing's recovery in jeopardy and raise more doubt about the company in the eyes of its airline customers.

Workers were in no mood to listen.