It's sad, really, that perhaps the best newspaper journalist in Seattle doesn't write for a Seattle newspaper. Timothy Egan on Boeing in the New York Times:

This is how the middle class dies, not with a bang, but a forced squeeze. After a global corporation posts record profits, it asks the state that has long nurtured its growth for the nation’s biggest single tax break, and then tells the people who make its products that their pension plan will be frozen, their benefits slashed, their pay raises meager. Take it or we leave. And everyone caves.

[...] What Boeing wants is very simple: to pay the people who make its airplanes as little money as it can get away with. It needs to do this, we’re told, to stay competitive. It has all the leverage, because enough states — and countries — are willing to give it everything it asks for. Who wouldn’t want a gleaming factory stuffed with jet assemblers, a payroll guaranteed for a generation?

Boeing is on a roll, its stock at a record high despite the troubled rollout of its 787 Dreamliner, and the pay of its C.E.O. boosted 20 percent to a package totaling $27.5 million last year. It is not impelled, as the auto industry was five years ago, in the midst of bailouts and cutbacks. Boeing could afford to be generous, or at least not onerous. But it’s easier to play state against state, the race to the bottom.

Read Egan's whole piece. Read it. And then read yesterday's small-picture, anti-labor Seattle Times editorial on the same subject, and weep for our city:

Union members need to understand where management is coming from. To Boeing, the decision about where to build the 777X is about how to price the airplane today for delivery in the early 2020s. The company has to figure out how much it can charge for a 777X and how much it must pay to get it built. Boeing’s offer to the Machinists was aimed to fix a price.

By saying “no,” the union has set a higher price for building the airplane in Washington.

Is all lost for building the 777X in Everett? That’s unclear. But if District 751 wants to build that plane here, the union — leadership and rank and file together — should make the next overture to Boeing, and soon.

Yup. This is all the Machinists fault. And they're getting what they deserve. Or something.

On every count, both the opinion and the prose, this editorial is a disgrace.