Tuesday, July 26, 2011
This little piggy went to "market," Part 2…
"It's nice that you want to tell a story and all, Bill, with all the detail you can think of but we're just two days until the vote and at the rate you're going you won't be finished until Labor Day, so can you just get to the damn point?!"
Okay, okay, okay…
The point is this: the Company says they want to provide the WTPU workforce with market-based pay and benefits but their offer to us little to do so.
Medical benefits: The only place they come close. The "market" appears to be pretty much paying at least 20% of costs and I would say a gradual increase to that goal is quite reasonable.
Pension benefits: The "Additional Contribution / Transitional Contribution" scheme we currently have may provide a relatively equitable pension payout for those of us "old-timers" who had a lot of years with Boeing and are close to retirement. But for my middle-aged coworkers and, especially, the young newhires, the small percentage 401(k) payment received annually is no where near close to the guaranteed pensions given by virtually every other airplane manufacturer in Wichita.
Salaries and Incentives: And this is where they really lost me. Spirit says they want to keep us at a salary slightly below market -- 97%, to be exact -- and then give us Incentive Plan bonuses that would give us a slightly-above average annual wage in years the company has just average performance of a 1.0 "target" and a significant bonus in years we do really well. Annual raises pools would be tied directly to agreed-to market data. All of which would be fine, except their offer doesn't do that.
- Spirit has offered an Incentive Plan that would pay out only 3% for the first half of the contract. Now, I may have forgotten most of my elementary school arithmetic but my addition of 97 + 3 equals only 100% of market and not the "slightly above market" that the company says we deserve
- Not only that, Spirit wants to limit the market-based raise pools to an arbitrary 3%. This means that even if the average raise pools across the industry market were, say, 3.9% each year1, we would only receive 3%, losing 9/10ths for the year and dropping us below the 97% at which the company says we should be maintained. Coupled with the Company's plan to cut those raise pools even deeper, should we not make the annual performance targets, and we could lose almost 2% to market every year of the contract.
All we've been asking for is that the company live up to its stated values of providing the market-based wages and benefits we deserve and, until they do, I will recommend and vote NO to their contract offers.
-- Bill, who's glad to see two of his favorite Tool Designers, John and Ron, sign up just to vote this sucker down. Now that you're here, we hope you stick around...
Notes:
1 - Salary increase estimates for the next decade range from 3.5% to 4.2%. In my example, I used the Congressional Budget Office estimates for 2012 – 2021 which project real average wage growth for the next decade to be 3.9%: 1.4 % (pg 74) over the projected inflation rate of 2.5% (page 24)
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