OLYMPIA, Dec. 17.—The earth shook, the heavens thundered and when Gov. Jay Inslee held his Christmas party Monday night labor stayed home. By calling for local leaders of the Machinists Union to let their people vote on a new Boeing contract offer, the governor triggered a Democratic-family blowup that left untold cartons of egg nog undrunk — and demonstrated why so many political figures are so worried just now.

Labor Council President Jeff Johnson posted a statement Monday on the organization’s website telling the governor to butt out. Inslee’s attempt to weigh in on an internal labor matter was “absolutely disrespectful to the Machinists and the labor movement,” he declared. Labor high-ups let it be known publicly they would be no-shows at the governor’s mansion for the holiday shindig.

Johnson wasn’t the only one taking his outrage public. House Labor and Commerce Chairman Mike Sells, D-Everett, posted a note on his Facebook feed that was widely circulated among the statehouse crowd over the weekend. Sells fumed that neither Inslee nor any other of the politicians calling for a contract vote “had the courtesy to call local labor leaders in Snohomish County to discuss the issue. It speaks volumes about how many of them view working people.”

And so on. But it is an issue with a wee bit more significance than a holiday party and a garden-variety contract dispute. Boeing, the state’s largest employer, is threatening to move production of its next-generation 777X airliner out-of-state unless the union’s 31,000 members make concessions on pension benefits. With the production line will go tens of thousands of jobs, the state’s hopes for a new carbon-fiber industry and billions of dollars in tax revenue. Rank-and-file members last month overwhelmingly rejected a contract proposal negotiated by the international union leadership. Now local union officials are balking at another round of balloting on a much-sweetened offer. Hence the chorus of Washington-state politicians, Inslee among them, who last Friday called for the union’s local leaders to let the vote proceed. It was hard not to notice the pleading tone.   

Now here’s the part you don’t know. The spat was foreshadowed last week at a conference staged by the Washington Budget and Policy Center, a liberal think tank that provides policy-analysis heft on the left side of the aisle. Just as the contract talks were breaking down last Thursday afternoon, both Johnson and Inslee made appearances. Johnson offered a considerably more detailed explanation of the labor position than anything heard since the conflict went nuclear. Resentments run deeper than you might think – and it helps explain how Inslee managed to touch a nerve among his most ardent supporters.

People Versus the Powerful

You have to consider the context. The Budget and Policy Center’s 2^nd annual Budget Matters Conference, attended by 300 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, featured a series of speakers who called income inequality the biggest problem facing the state and nation. They said the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; the political system is controlled by the wealthy and powerful; the middle class is being squeezed by corporate interests that demonstrate little interest in the public welfare. The talk was of the “narrative” and the challenges involved in getting the public to buy it. “You really do have wealthy people who can essentially buy the policy agenda they want and block the policy agenda they don’t want,” said luncheon speaker Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy priorities in Washington, D.C. “And that has led to a level of dysfunctional politics that I would tie directly to inequality growth.”

The one ray of hope? The passage of the $15-an-hour minimum wage ballot proposition in the city of SeaTac last month, where a hard-fought door-to-door campaign ultimately passed the measure by a bare 77 votes. It made SeaTac the first city in the country to heed the call of activists who are urging a massive increase in the minimum wage. The measure has hoteliers and concessionaires at Sea-Tac International Airport trembling; with any luck, said newly elected SeaTac councilwoman Kathryn Campbell, the movement will spread to Seattle. “One of the things about Prop. 1 in SeaTac was that it was only targeted at people who work for multinational corporations that can afford to pay their workers better,” she said. “And maybe take a little less to the Cayman Islands.”

At an afternoon session on Better Jobs for a Better Washington, it was Johnson’s turn.

The Battle of Boeing

The Machinists showed great courage when they rejected the Boeing contract last month, Johnson said. Maybe they make more money than most workers, he allowed, but their fight is the same as everyone else’s. The Boeing Co. wants to switch their defined-benefit pension plan, under which the company bears the risks of the investment markets, to a defined-contribution 401(k)-style plan, under which the employees face the risk. Anyone with a 401(k) in 2008 found out how well that worked, he said. “You know, the Machinists’ vote a few weeks ago to try to protect the defined benefit plan was looked at by the media as an extreme thing – there aren’t many of these plans anymore, my God, why should they be trying to protect these? We’ve got to try to somehow bring that back to changing the narrative. This is middle-of-the-road stuff.”

Workers everywhere are fighting back, he said. Unions are organizing workers who have traditionally gone unrepresented – farm workers, day laborers, domestic workers, taxicab drivers. A concerted effort last year led the Seattle city council to require employers to provide paid sick leave. Johnson called the SeaTac proposition a watershed, not just because of the minimum wage, but because of workplace provisions that among other things require employers to give workers more hours before hiring more people. He said the Battle of Boeing ought to be seen the same way.

 “We were so extraordinarily proud of these workers for the vote that they took, against all odds. And our state, our governor, our Legislature put extraordinary pressure on these men and women by basically holding a press conference and saying to the world, we’re going to do our job. We’re going to pass the largest tax break in the history of this country, and perhaps the whole damn world, right? …They put this enormous pressure on these workers and their families. All I could think of was, can you imagine going home to the dinner table that night after seeing that press conference? Now it all hangs on you.

“Are you willing to accept a unilateral proposal that cuts benefits you have fought for all your career, in order to land this new line of production that is an extension of something you have already been building for a couple of decades?

“I was fortunate enough to speak at the banquet the Machinists were putting on Saturday night before their vote. My wife and I got there early. We walked around the crowd; there were about 500 folks there. I got to meet old friends and make some new friends, but basically I listened to the stories that the workers had to tell. And what I had known intellectually, I understood emotionally after these conversations. This is a workforce that really is intergenerational. I met grandparents, parents, sons and daughters and nephews and nieces who all worked for the Boeing corporation and the aerospace sector. So there is no way that they would vote to deprive the secure retirement income from their kids. Who would do that? Who in their right minds would do that?

“So it became apparent to me at that point in time that this was going down and was going down bigtime. You just don’t do this. You don’t mess with family.”

Inslee in the Headlights

As Johnson was finishing his talk Thursday afternoon, the emails started flying: Local Machinists Union leaders were balking at the second-round contract offer. Too similar to the first, they were saying. And immediately after Johnson’s session was over it was Inslee’s turn to speak. The governor faced the crowd with a bit less ebullience than is typical when he addresses a friendly audience.

“I think I did the responsible thing in order to help economic growth and produce middle-class jobs in the state of Washington,” he said. The Boeing break merely continues the tax treatment the company has received for the last decade, he argued; even with $8 billion in forgone taxes the state will still earn $21 billion in additional revenue.  And he said there are safeguards built in so that Boeing will not be able to take the tax breaks and move any portion of future production out of state, as it did with the 787. “We locked that down. [We said] you are not going to treat us like chumps again in that regard.”

Yet when it came to the concessions the Machinists are being asked to make, Inslee had little to say to the progressives. “I hope that [the negotiations] succeed. I know this is a difficult situation. All of us in the state of Washington hope that that succeeds.”

It took a day for it to become clear that the negotiations would not. Inslee issued his statement late Friday afternoon: “Union membership gives each worker a say in his or her future,” he said. A vote “should happen soon as I have become increasingly convinced that we are at a perilous point in our effort to bring the 777X to Washington state.”

And so came the blistering responses, the holiday-party cancellations – and a demand from the Labor Council that Inslee apologize. Johnson’s statement called the Machinists “working-class heroes,” and declared that if Boeing leaves the state, it’s not labor’s fault – it is Boeing’s “desire to break the community standards that the Machinists have sacrificed and collectively bargained for over the decades.”

Inslee wasn’t the only nervous politician calling for the local union leadership to relent. Congressman Rick Larsen, D-Wash., issued a statement of his own. Snohomish County pols also urged a vote. Senate Majority Leader Rodney Tom, D-Medina and Senate Republican Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, expressed similar sentiments in an email to Machinists local president Tom Wroblewski. But because Tom and Schoesler are leaders of the Republican-leaning Majority Coalition Caucus, it is unlikely labor would be attending their Christmas party.