More than 3,000 Boeing machinists entered their third day of a strike on Wednesday. The workers, who make fighter jets and weapons systems at facilities in Illinois and Missouri, are organizing for better pay, benefits and scheduling.

The walk-out comes in what is supposed to be a turnaround year for Boeing. 

Boeing had a rough few years at the start of the pandemic. There were safety issues, late aircraft deliveries, and astronauts stranded in space for 8 months.

But Sam Engel, an aviation consultant with ICF, said more recently, “the vibe coming out of the company seems to be one of turning upward.”

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg has touted this as the firm's “turnaround year.” Deliveries of commercial planes are up. President Donald Trump’s new trade deal with the EU includes a tariff exemption for aircraft. And Engel said the firm just won a $20 billion contract to make fighter jets for the U.S.

“The Trump administration in some ways has made for smoother sailing for Boeing,” he said.

And with defense spending up, Boeing’s workers sensed opportunity, said Richard Aboulafia of Aerodynamic Advisory.

“This is the first time in literally decades that labor has actually had power because, well, the markets want their aircraft now,” he said.

Exercising that power was never going to be easy, said Aboulafia. The current labor dispute is just the latest in a string of them for Boeing.

“[Boeing’s] got a rich tradition, several decades of really bad labor relations. For a time back in the 2000s and 2010s, it seemed like the CEO's highest priority was to basically break organized labor,” he said.

Aboulafia said things were on track to improve with Ortberg, the current CEO. Last year, machinists in Boeing’s commercial aircraft division won a 38% wage increase over four years. But, Aboulafia added, sometimes old habits die hard.

The defense workers who went on strike this week are still feeling the pain of negotiations more than a decade ago, said Jake Rosenfeld, who researches labor at Washington University.

“Back in 2014, they handed over steep concessions, accepting buyouts, a pension freeze in order to keep work in the St. Louis region,” he said.

More broadly, Rosenfeld said this strike is something of a return-to-form for the labor movement nationwide.

“We had a couple years of kind of heightened labor activity that kind of quieted down in the first, you know, five, six months of 2025,” he said.

He said that’s because, with slowing economic growth, employers seem to be gaining the upper hand. “You see this across all sorts of dynamics, including, you know, return-to-office policies,” he said.

But Rosenfeld said the Boeing strike shows that the heightened worker expectations from the last few years haven’t gone away.