Similarly, while the company is willing to boost pension contributions, it's also trying to limit death benefits for survivors, giving spouses of deceased Boeing workers a flat $4,000 payment instead of guaranteed monthly payments for life.

Such problems, says Wise, are "in the fine print" of the proposed contract.

IAM officials argue that Boeing has no business seeking any such rollbacks when the company is thriving. Instead, they say, it should be sharing the gains. In past years, especially when airplane orders dried up just after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the company put thousands of workers on furlough.

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Now, with its record order backlog, it has had to hire many of them back and add thousands more. "The company came at us with takeaways in the last two rounds (2002 and 2005) and members see how dramatic the turnaround has been," says IAM Communications Manager Connie Kelliher. "They believe it's time to make improvements."

Troubled by Dreamliner delays
Workers are also troubled by poor business moves they say has hurt both them and the company. Outsourcing, for instance, has contributed to three delays so far in the 787 Dreamliner program, with the first flight expected by yearend, more than a year late.

If important parts of the plane were built in Seattle, instead of by suppliers around the world, the Dreamliner would have arrived on time, the unionists insist. They say both the company and its employees would have been better off. Indeed, management acknowledges problems with parts have contributed to the 787 delay.

Management scandals of various sorts have also plagued Boeing and enraged the workers. Boeing Chief Executive Officer James McNerney took the top job in 2005 after Harry Stonecipher was felled by a romantic peccadillo with another Boeing executive. Stonecipher had succeeded Philip Condit, whose standing was hurt by a defense contracting scandal around the awarding of an airborne refueling tanker contract that involved executives below him, even though Condit was not personally implicated.

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The management tumult, IAM members say, has led to shifts in the way the company is run. It may not have helped that management in 2001 relocated its top executives from Seattle to Chicago, a step that has kept them far from the airplane assembly plants and disgruntled workers.

Openness annoys workers
Finally, some workers are troubled by the way Boeing has tried to bargain in the recent talks — because management has been so open about it. Instead of sequestering themselves with union leaders to try to hammer out a deal, the company posted several successive offers on its Web site.

It loudly sought to have a traditional pension program replaced with a 401(k)-like plan and to kill medical benefits for early retirees, which the union had said would inspire a strike. Management then dropped both threats. "For a month, the factory was in chaos, literally, with noise and horns and people rebelling," says Wise. "You were shell-shocked."

CONTINUED : Plenty of skeptics

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