Use historical salary charts to see why younger members shouldn't want guaranteed increase
From talk around the office, it feels like the younger employees are the ones most passionate about the majority of the salary pool being guaranteed, but my experience of over 35 years in SPEEA is that is the opposite of what would be best for them. Please use the salary data archive available to you on the member portal to judge for yourself.
I have worked at Boeing since 1990. I have seen many contracts and many different wage pools. Most of my experience is where the majority of the pool was selective. My experience by looking at the salary charts every year is that members younger than the average age get raises on average larger than the pool and older worker get less than the pool.
To access the older charts,
- login to the SPEEA member portal
- go to the salary chart page
- pick 2026 Prof (or Tech) icon
- scroll down the page to just below the "Show 25 per page" to the "Salary Chart Archive"
- Choose which year you want to see charts for. I suggest 2014 because 5% is a large enough pool to show the trends.
As a SPEEA member do yourself a favor and use the archive to compare how the raises are distributed in 2026 for Prof's (3% pool, 2% guaranteed) to 2014 (5% pool, small guarantee). In 2026 very few people received raises above the pool and I can understand how that is disappointing and demoralizing especially if you are a high performer. In 2014 for most of the charts I scanned, the majority of the 7% or more raises were for the bottom 1/4 of the age group and the majority of the people over 45 years received raises below the pool (4% or less). This makes a lot of sense, someone that with 3 years of experience improves a lot with one more year of learning they deserve to earn more money relative to inflation. Someone with 30 years of experience rarely makes a sudden leap in capability, they deserve to keep even with inflation.
The charts that are most useful are the ones with the tables at the bottom that show Average % Increase for each level. Typically the Level 1's and 2's are getting on average higher than the Level 4's.m The next chart to consider is the dot chart and look for the dots representing the the trends. For 2014, green triangles are 7% or greater. You will notice the big raises are mostly happening for those under 35.
Use the data available to you instead of just listening to the crowd. If you are young, your experience has been skewed by a small pool where a large % was guaranteed.