Union negotiators slammed Boeing’s new offer to lift hourly wages for striking workers by 30 percent on Monday, saying it “missed the mark” and won’t be voted on by members.

“This proposal does not go far enough to address your concerns, and Boeing has missed the mark with this proposal,” union negotiators told members in a message.

“They are trying to drive a wedge between our members and weaken our solidarity with this divisive strategy.”

Boeing had sweetened its initial offer in an effort to end a 10-day stoppage that shuttered Seattle-area plants.

“We first presented the offer to the union and then transparently shared the details with our employees,” Boeing told AFP in a statement.

“We have bargained in good faith with the IAM (union) since formal negotiations began in March.”

The aviation giant gave workers until Friday at midnight to ratify its “best and final offer.”

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said there wasn’t enough time to discuss the offer with members and tend to the voting before the Boeing deadline.

“The company has refused to meet for further discussion; therefore, we will not be voting on the 27th,” union negotiators told members.

The union noted it will gather workers’ opinions regarding the offer.

About 33,000 IAM members from District 751 in the Pacific Northwest region walked off the job on September 13 after overwhelmingly voting down an earlier offer, effectively shutting down assembly plants for the 737 MAX and 777.

The 30 percent general wage increase improves on the 25 percent in the earlier offer, which was initially endorsed by IAM leaders before the rank-and-file workforce rejected it decisively.

Workers have sought a 40 percent wage increase, citing more than a decade of meager pay boosts that have taxed family budgets in a costly region of the United States during a period of consumer price inflation.

The new proposal also reinstates an annual bonus that had been removed in the earlier version.

Line workers had complained that the loss of the bonus meant that the earlier proposal amounted to less than the 25 percent wage hike advertised by the company.

The new proposal also doubles a ratification bonus to $6,000 and lifts the company’s contribution to employees’ 401K program. But the amended offer does not reinstate the pension, a demand of some workers.

The two sides undertook two days of mediation last week with assistance from government officials.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said ending the strike was “a top priority.”

Boeing ‘could do better’

Surveys of line workers have shown general wages, the reinstatement of the bonus and the pension as priorities, the IAM has said.

Brian Bryant, president of the IAM international union, said the latest offer from Boeing “validates” the decision to strike.

“Employees knew Boeing executives could do better, and this shows the workers were right all along,” Bryant said in a statement.

Boeing employee Mike Corsetti said he looked forward to studying the proposal in detail, saying, “it’s closer but I’m not sure it’s good enough.”

The amended deal maintains other provisions, such as a pledge to build Boeing’s next new airplane in the Pacific Northwest.

The strike has added to Boeing’s woes as it faces heavy scrutiny from regulators due to safety problems.

Federal Aviation Administrator Mike Whitaker is scheduled to sit for two congressional hearings this week on the agency’s oversight of Boeing.

Shares of Boeing ended the formal trading day up two percent.

© 2024 AFP

When Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana realized most of the clients in its job-training program lacked a high school diploma, it set out to address the issue.

In 2010, with the help of per-pupil funding from the state, the nonprofit opened The Excel Center, a tuition-free high school tailored for adults. The charter school offered flexible schedules, free on-site child care, transportation assistance and a life coach. Thirteen years later, research by my team at the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities shows that The Excel Center is a success.

Indiana graduates of the program, which has now expanded to 10 other states and the District of Columbia, were able to find better jobs and earn substantially more over their lifetimes than their peers who did not graduate from the program.

At the Lab for Economic Opportunities—or LEO—I worked with colleagues Rebecca Brough and David Phillips to measure the economic return of graduating from The Excel Center. We found that graduates of The Excel Center experience a nearly 40% increase in earnings five years after applying—or roughly US$80,000 more in their pockets over their lifetimes—than similarly situated adults who applied but did not enroll. The LEO team did not receive any funding from The Excel Center or Goodwill in its research, although Goodwill provided assistance with data.

More steady employment

According to our research, graduates of The Excel Center didn’t just earn more, but the jobs they found were more stable. Excel graduates experienced a 22% increase in continuous employment within the same industry over five years than their peers in the comparison group. Graduates of the program were 19% less likely to work in the hospitality industry—among the lowest-paid sectors in the country—and more likely to work jobs such as pharmacy technician, dental assistant or in HVAC maintenance.

In addition to a diploma, students earned industry-recognized credentials, such as those in phlebotomy and child development, and certification as nursing assistants and pharmacy technicians. These credentials opened up careers in industries such as health care and education.

Some students used the certificates as a launching point for additional study at the local community college. At the time we conducted our research, Excel graduates in Indiana were more likely to have earned college credits: Roughly 30% of Excel graduates earned college credit, compared with 11.5% of the group that didn’t enroll.

To reach these conclusions, we looked at the data of more than 9,000 Excel Center applicants from 2013–15. We focused on their earnings over the five years before and after they applied to the program. Our analysis compared the experience of Excel students—both graduates and nongraduates—with other adult residents of Indiana from similar backgrounds who had expressed interest in going to The Excel Center but never enrolled.

Why it matters

The Excel program is not just good for the students who graduate; it offers the states who help fund the program a return on their investment. Because graduates earn more, they pay more in taxes, allowing states to recoup much of the per-student cost over the graduates’ working careers. Each additional dollar of government funding generates $20 in benefits for the typical Excel Center student, measured as the present value of their lifetime increase in after-tax earnings.

In contrast, federally funded programs such as Job Corps and Adult Education and Literacy primarily help adults without credentials study and pass a high school equivalency exam, such as the GED test. But research suggests a GED diploma has little effect on earnings, especially for women.

More than 23 million adults in the U.S. lack a high school credential such as a diploma or a GED certificate. They are not only shut out of most jobs but also earn substantially less than their peers who have graduated from high school.

Plans to expand

Goodwill is leveraging the LEO study to expand the impact of its programs. In addition to the 18 Excel Center campuses the group currently operates throughout central and southern Indiana, it has partnered with Goodwill regions across the country to bring adult high schools to Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.

LEO’s data was cited directly when Arizona, which had been one of 18 states without a high school option for adults, decided to join the Excel roster. In February 2020, state lawmakers—prompted by testimony from Goodwill and by the LEO research—amended the state’s law to establish a continuing high school program in the state.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans have overfished the ocean, cleared forests, polluted water and created a climate crisis by burning fossil fuels. These actions are affecting biodiversity around the world, from remote islands to our own backyards.

Biodiversity can refer to all the different kinds of life that can be found in just one area of the world, or the teeming variety of animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms like bacteria that comprise all life on Earth. In either case, each species collaborates in ecosystems to generate everything in nature that we need to survive: food, clean water, clean air, medicine and shelter—these are what scientists call “ecosystem services.”

The rapacious consumption of resources by a minority of humanity—and the resulting waste—is causing the variety of living things to diminish and ecosystems to deteriorate. A 2022 report found an average 69% decline in global populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians since 1970. It is also estimated that more than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of its freshwater is now devoted to crop or livestock production.

Even as businesses are engaged in this destruction, they depend on reliable and cheap access to the services ecosystems provide, such as food and clean water. According to a report by the World Economic Forum, US$44 trillion (£34 trillion) of economic value—over half the world’s total GDP—is at least moderately dependent on nature and its services and, as a result, exposed to risks from nature loss. The same is true for finance. The European Central Bank estimates that almost 75% of all bank loans are made to borrower companies that depend highly on at least one ecosystem service.

Given this interdependency, businesses are obliged to address the drivers of biodiversity loss. Corporate biodiversity disclosures are one potential solution. The idea being that, by making a transparent declaration of its dependency and impact on nature, a business could shift its operations away from activities that harm biodiversity.

At the end of September, countries will gather in New York City for fresh talks at the World Biodiversity Summit. If nature-positive investments are indeed the aim, how businesses engage with biodiversity will have to change drastically.

Efficient markets?

A global agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, signed in 2022, included a target for businesses and financiers to report how their activities affect and depend on biodiversity.

The ideological basis for this measure is the efficient market hypothesis. This maintains that, if all relevant information is made available, a well-functioning market will align itself with the way market participants value a business. The expectation is that, once a business’s relationship to biodiversity is disclosed, the market will use this information to steer money away from high-risk businesses.

However, research shows that most businesses do not consider biodiversity loss a material risk. Some may voluntarily disclose their impacts on biodiversity anyway, to manage reputational damage. For instance, AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, offered an account of the company’s commitment to biodiversity in a 2023 report. In it, the company acknowledged how its supply chains might affect biodiversity and promised to invest US$400 million that year to plant and maintain 200 million trees by 2030. Such commitments are not legally binding and so there’s a risk that they might not actually materialize.

Overall, this is typical of biodiversity disclosures that have been made so far: undertaken voluntarily and with no universal guidelines or measurement systems that organizations might use to report and manage their impact on biodiversity or be held to account for. Such disclosures add cost, complexity and risk to the operations of companies and investors which few will undertake voluntarily, and the quality of these disclosures varies anyway.

There are other problems. The 2022 agreement urged businesses to increase the prevalence of disclosures, with little regard to them being comprehensive and accurate. Although some standards and frameworks that have been developed so far aim to factor biodiversity into business decisions, they prioritize the short-term financial interests of a business over its long-term duty to biodiversity conservation and restoration.

Take the problem of selective reporting. A company can highlight a small reforestation project in its disclosure and ignore or dilute the habitat destruction caused by its operations on a much larger scale. Without an explicit reference to the tangible effects or benefits for biodiversity, such standards and frameworks cannot contribute toward the goals of the agreement.

Full disclosure

There is a risk of proliferating ambiguous or selective disclosures which hide rather than mitigate biodiversity loss, and so create the illusion of progress.

We can, for example, imagine a case in which a company involved in natural rubber production selectively discloses its “nature-friendly” plan to plant large numbers of a single tree and call it reforestation, offsetting the harm of its rubber plantations. This would instead harm biodiversity by destroying plants and animals that depended on the original, more diverse ecosystem.

More specific measures, such as species richness and habitat quality, are needed to help people understand whether progress is being made towards biodiversity goals. Simply counting the number of companies with biodiversity disclosures opens up huge potential for greenwashing.

Mandatory disclosures, with penalties for non-compliance, should require businesses to measure, set targets and report on their progress across their full value chain—from the initial design of products, to the sourcing of raw materials, through to production, marketing, distribution and after-sale services.

Scientists should help create and refine the rules about what businesses have to report, ensuring they are based on scientific evidence. Policymakers and regulators, on the other hand, need to enforce these rules and make sure businesses follow them. Such an approach would not only help determine what works, but more broadly, ensures that disclosures are fit for conserving nature—and not just protecting investment.

AstraZeneca was approached for comment but no response was received.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.