It's a notion that is disintegrating. He's just not part of it. The crowd cheers, whistles, and laughs. It goes on for so long that rally organizers have to plead for silence to make way for other speakers. Standard strike rhetoric perhaps, but at a company where loyalty and a discretion bordering on secretiveness have always been the rule, it represents a dramatic cultural shift.
Workers are more openly critical of management than ever before.
That's because many see management as undermining the values that the company has always stood for, namely its dedication to people and quality. There have been strikes at Boeing before, but those were by the more militant machinists union. Even the people who have always said that whatever is good for the company is good for us, the conservatives of the conservatives, they're out on strike. Obviously, these folks hated the contract they were offered, the initial version of which required them to pay a portion of their medical premiums for the first time. But more than the dollar amounts at stake, they felt that the company was dealing with them in a new way.