Industrials and Manufacturing Sector

Boeing's 17,000 white-collar engineers and technicians rejected the company's four-year contract offer on Friday, with 64% of the professional unit and 72% of the technical unit voting no. The union, SPEEA, authorized a strike by overwhelming margins—87.8% of engineers and 89.7% of technicians—if no deal is reached by October 6, when the current contract expires. Boeing offered a 29.4% aggregate wage pool increase over four years, the largest since 1983, plus three extra paid leave days and limits on mandatory overtime. The problem: inflation-based raises were capped at 3%, while Seattle-area inflation ran 4.5% over the past year, meaning real wages would fall behind. Union members told Reuters the offer failed to match what competing aerospace firms pay, and deeper mistrust of Boeing management—rooted in outsourced engineering jobs, quality corners cut for schedule, and over a decade without full negotiations—made even the negotiating team's endorsement ring hollow. Boeing said it is implementing a strike contingency plan and diverting investment dollars meant for SPEEA workers to prepare for a work stoppage. A strike would further delay certification of the 737 Max 10 and 777-9, both years behind schedule. No new talks are scheduled.

The European Commission closed an antitrust investigation into Pratt & Whitney Canada on Friday after the engine manufacturer removed contractual clauses that had restricted independent spare-parts suppliers' access to used engines and certification services. The investigation centered on whether Pratt & Whitney Canada's agreements limited the ability of maintenance shops to buy used engine cores from other suppliers or provide services to independent aftermarket businesses—a market where airlines and operators source serviceable used material as an alternative to buying new parts from the original equipment manufacturer. Pratt & Whitney Canada, owned by RTX, amended its contracts to eliminate those restrictions and clarified that maintenance shops could purchase used material freely. The Commission said the changes removed the obstacles to competition it had identified and closed the case without imposing a fine or making a formal infringement finding. The outcome mirrors a U.S. settlement: Universal Turbine Parts had sued Pratt & Whitney Canada in federal court alleging similar contractual barriers to the PT6 and PW100 engine families, and the companies reached a confidential settlement in December 2025 after a judge allowed key claims to proceed. The European closure removes regulatory uncertainty for RTX in the region and leaves independent suppliers with fewer contractual obstacles to obtaining parts.

Google won a bankruptcy auction to acquire internal operational data and software code from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines for $10 million. The winning bid secures roughly 100 million employee emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint files, and 516 source code repositories. Google plans to feed this digital back-office archive into its artificial intelligence models and product development pipelines. A third party will strip personally identifiable information from the files before delivery, with Google covering the anonymization costs and bearing the contractual obligation to keep the dataset isolated from specific households. The asset sale bested a $7.5 million competing bid from AI data specialist Mercor. Spirit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and ceased operations in May 2026, excluded passenger profiles and credit card records from the transaction.