Boeing paid out $418M in bonuses to WA employees last month

Boeing paid out annual bonuses totaling $418 million to about 68,000 eligible employees in Washington state last month.

That’s down from $513 million paid to 64,000 employees a year earlier.

Companywide, this year Boeing paid out a total of $1.2 billion in annual bonuses to more than 154,000 employees.

Last year, about the same amount was paid to 143,000 employees

This year’s bonuses average just over $6,100 pretax in Washington state and about $7,600 pretax companywide.

Boeing determines the size of the bonuses based on both company and individual performance metrics. Each year management sets targets higher than the previous year’s performance.

For all white-collar staff, the metrics determining the bonuses paid this year were 75% financial: cash flow, profits and revenue.

However, with Boeing plunged into crisis following the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout in January, management announced internally earlier this month that the bonuses paid out next year will instead be weighted 60% on quality and safety metrics.

During an all-employee webcast, Boeing Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Pope — now newly appointed chief executive of the Commercial Airplanes unit in addition to her COO role — said this shift in the future bonus structure is “very, very important to drive the outcomes that we’re all committed to, and that’s to deliver a safe and quality product to our customer.”

For the bonuses paid last month however, the metrics were chiefly financial, all of which last year were significantly better than the previous year, though coming in below the goals set by leadership.

The 25% of the weighting for 2023 operational performance was based on metrics including quality, production stability, employee safety, climate and equity, diversity and inclusion.

Commercial Airplanes vs. Defense performance

Boeing scored the performance of each separate business unit, with the Commercial Airplanes division awarded 72% of target, the Defense and Space division 80%, the profitable Services division 119% and corporate employees 90%.

For members of Boeing’s white-collar union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, or SPEEA, the target bonus was 5% of total pay in 2023.

So for an engineer working on commercial jets, this produced a bonus of 3.6% of total pay in 2023, down from a 5.8% bonus the previous year.

An engineer who works on defense projects got a 4% bonus, up from 3.6% the previous year.

The bottom line, according to SPEEA data, is that its members received a total of $85 million.

The union’s 12,766 engineers got bonuses totaling $66 million, or $5,179 pretax on average.

SPEEA’s 5,094 technical staff got bonuses totaling almost $19 million, or $3,713 pretax on average.

Boeing’s local blue-collar workers, members of the International Association of Machinists union, are paid according to a separate bonus plan with payouts determined by preset targets for employee safety, productivity and quality metrics.

The IAM bonus paid in February was 3.8% of total 2023 wages including overtime pay, up from 3.7% the previous year.

The union did not provide dollar figures for the bonuses its members received.