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Bombardier employees represented by the Canadian Unifor union ended a strike in July 2024.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats are roiling an aerospace labor force that only recently achieved a measure of stability following successive strikes.
“Right now, our members are feeling a lot of uncertainty,” says Peter Greenberg, international affairs director at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers [IAM] union. “Their livelihoods and the continued success of aerospace in this country, and particularly in business aviation, are weighing on all their minds.”
Greenberg’s comments fell during a March 11 National Business Aviation Association [NBAA] News Hour webcast. That day, the U.S. president threatened to double his planned tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports to 50% after Ontario leaders announced a 25% surcharge on electricity exported to three U.S. states.
Within hours, Trump walked back the global metals tariff to 25% for Canada after Ontario agreed to suspend the electricity surcharge. Nevertheless, Canada and other U.S. trading partners including the European Union announced retaliatory tariffs.
The whiplash of tariffs and retaliation have unnerved an aerospace workforce and supply chain still recovering from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and has injected uncertainty in international business aircraft transactions.
“This uncertainty extends into [the] investment that our employers might be willing to spend to upgrade or expand their facilities,” Greenberg says. “It is also something that we might see in collective bargaining, where this uncertainty affects our members in their paychecks. We obviously hope for a quick resolution.”
Fifteen aviation industry associations wrote to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on March 12 seeking a meeting about the state of the industry. The letter asks Trump administration officials to “provide an exemption for aerospace from any tariff consideration to give time to consider all relevant polices to bolster industry competitiveness and ensure there are no unintended consequences.”
The IAM claims to represent 150,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada employed by aerospace manufacturers, suppliers, and repair shops. The number includes 5,000 hourly employees at Textron Aviation’s plants in Wichita, who went back to work in October after a month-long strike produced a new five-year contract.
The union also counts Bombardier workers in Canada and the U.S. among its members, including employees in Wichita, the Canadian manufacturer’s U.S. headquarters. The IAM represents Airbus workers in Canada who support production sites in the U.S., and Boeing workers in the Seattle area, who accepted a new contract in November 2024 following a seven-week strike.
Bombardier employees belonging to the Canadian trade union Unifor, which includes production, office, professional and technical workers involved in manufacturing Global business jets, ended an 18-day strike in July 2024 after ratifying a new three-year collective agreement.
“We have really had an exciting and successful last few years since the end of the COVID pandemic, where we’ve seen a lot of growth and stability that we had not experienced in a while,” Greenberg says of the IAM rank and file. “For our members, that included improved collective bargaining agreements, improved wages and benefits and—perhaps more importantly—career stability.”
A trade war threatens to destabilize an aerospace industry that has become increasingly integrated over decades, Greenberg says. He notes the industry has structured itself within trade relationships that predate the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement [USMCA], which Trump promoted and signed. The USMCA replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], which succeeded the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement [CUSFTA] of 1989.
“The supply chains have become so integrated in aerospace that it would be very difficult for the manufacturers to move into a phase of solely U.S.-based suppliers or solely Canadian suppliers,” Greenberg says. “Almost all of the big employers that we deal with have some form of integration.”
Greenberg doubts that Trump’s vision of restructuring or relocating industries to the U.S. will easily work for aerospace.
“You couldn’t just replicate what we have now in the U.S., because all the participants had to go through exhaustive procedures to make sure that the goods they are producing are safe and meet the standards of the regulators in multiple countries, not just the U.S. and Canada,” he says. “To try and unwind that, or to replicate existing pieces of the supply chain from scratch would be time-consuming, expensive and probably also have negative safety impacts.”
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