Before You Sign
Read This First

Why Are They Hiding It?

Let's start with what nobody organizing this union wants to talk about: they're doing it quietly for a reason. Think about that for a second. If joining the IAMAW was such a fantastic deal — a golden ticket, a workers' paradise — why would the organizers be sneaking around in hushed conversations, collecting signatures like they're running some kind of underground operation?

Funny how the people who claim to be fighting for transparency in the workplace can't seem to have a transparent conversation about what they're actually asking you to sign.

Yes — raises at L3Harris Wescam have not been what they once were since the Harris merger. That's a legitimate frustration, and it's worth pushing back on management about. But signing a union card is not "pushing back" — it is a fundamental and largely irreversible transformation of how your workplace operates, how your pay is determined, and what rights you have as an individual. You don't get to try it out for a year and return it if you don't like it.

The people who have only been here a couple of years, who haven't seen the full picture, who haven't built the relationships and reputation that come with tenure — they want to blow up the system because they haven't had a great year or two. That's understandable. It's also short-sighted.

Strike Pay: The Cruelest Joke

Here's where it gets interesting. And by interesting, I mean financially catastrophic if you're not paying attention. Everyone loves to talk about the union fighting for your raises. Almost nobody talks about what happens when negotiations break down and the union calls a strike. Because that's when you find out exactly how much the IAMAW values your rent payment.

During the massive 2024 Boeing machinists' strike — one of the most high-profile IAM strikes in recent memory — over 33,000 workers walked off the job. They were making an average of around $75,000 USD a year. That works out to roughly $1,440 USD a week in regular pay.

The Boeing strike lasted 53 days. At $250 per week, a striking worker brought home roughly $1,875 total in strike pay over nearly two months. If they were making the average machinist wage, they lost over $8,500 in actual take-home pay during that period — money they will never get back, no matter what raise they eventually negotiated.

Let's do that math plainly. The final Boeing deal gave workers a 38% wage increase spread over four years. Great — on paper. But workers first had to survive 53 days on $250 a week. That's not a negotiation tactic. That's the union gambling with your rent cheque.

And yes — there's a waiting period before strike pay even begins. You don't walk out and immediately get that life-changing $250. You wait. Meanwhile, your bills do not wait.

Now, to be fair — the IAM's own website proudly describes their dues as approximately two times the average hourly rate per month. So if you're making $35/hour, you'd be paying roughly $70+ a month in dues — every single month you're working — for the privilege of receiving $250 a week if things go sideways. That's a great deal. For the union. Not for you.

What This Actually Costs You

Let's be specific — because the organizers pushing this union certainly aren't being specific with you. This drive is aimed squarely at hourly manufacturing technicians. So let's talk about technician pay. Let's talk about what you're actually earning, what you've lost to two years of underperforming raises, and what a union contract would actually do about it — which is less than you think.

Manufacturing technicians at Wescam earn across a range — entry-level techs starting in the neighbourhood of $52,000–$58,000 CAD, mid-career technicians in the $65,000–$78,000 range, and experienced senior techs pushing higher depending on specialization and tenure. Wherever you sit in that range, the story is the same: historically, annual increases ran 3–4%. That's a reasonable progression — not spectacular, but it compounds over a career. Over the last two years, those increases have dropped to roughly 2.5%. That stings at every level of the range, especially when you watch the parent company post results like these:

Yes. You read that correctly. While L3Harris reported $2.6 billion USD in cash from operations in 2024 — up from $2.1 billion the year before — and while the CEO collected over $20 million USD in total compensation, the technicians building the actual hardware in Waterdown got 2.5%. Let that marinate.

That frustration is completely legitimate. That anger is completely justified. And it deserves to be heard — by management, by corporate, loudly and clearly. But handing the keys to the IAMAW is not how you fix it. Here's why.

Under a union contract, your pay is governed by a seniority-based pay grid. Everyone in your classification gets paid on the same scale. The technician who's been here 18 months and the one who's been here 12 years sit on the same ladder — different rungs, but the same ladder. Your performance review stops mattering to your paycheque. Your extra skills, your willingness to cross-train, your reliability on the night shift? They get you exactly what the contract says — nothing more.

Now here's the other side of the coin — the one the organizers will tell you about. "But a union will get us better raises!" Maybe. Maybe not. The union will negotiate a contract — but the company negotiates back. And the company has lawyers, time, and the ability to lock out employees or wait out a strike indefinitely. You have $340 CAD a week. In Ontario, with current rental prices in the Hamilton/Burlington/Waterdown area, that doesn't cover most people's rent — let alone everything else.

The real answer to 2.5% raises when corporate posts $2.6 billion in cash flow is to make that case loudly, collectively, and directly to management — without surrendering your individual merit path, your workplace flexibility, or your ability to be rewarded for being exceptional at what you do. Under Ontario's Labour Relations Act, 1995, once a union is certified, your employer must negotiate all compensation through the union — not with you personally. The Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) enforces this. Your performance review becomes a feel-good document with no dollar value attached to it.

Goodbye, Meritocracy

Let's talk about what the union doesn't advertise. The IAM, like virtually every major union, operates on a seniority-based pay model. Time served is the coin of the realm. Not output. Not innovation. Not the fact that you solved a problem last year that saved the company a hundred thousand dollars. Time served.

There's an old saying: unions protect the weakest members at the expense of the strongest. That's not a slur — that's functionally what collective bargaining does by design. It levels the field. And if you're the person who got into this field because you're good at it, because you work harder than the person next to you and you expect to be recognized for it — well, congratulations, you just voted to become equal to that person whether you wanted to or not.

• Merit raises above the contract rate become legally complicated — or impossible. Under Ontario's Labour Relations Act, 1995, your employer must negotiate compensation with the union, not with you. Attempting to reward individual employees above the agreed contract rate risks an unfair labour practice complaint to the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB). Think about that: the law will be used to prevent your employer from giving you a bigger raise.

• Your relationship with your manager becomes adversarial by design. The union's entire model is built on the premise that management is the enemy. At L3Harris Wescam — one of the safest, most well-run facilities many employees have ever worked at — that premise is simply false. Injecting that adversarial framework into a functional workplace is corrosive.

• Flexibility disappears. Have an arrangement with your manager — flexible hours, a special project, an accommodation that works for your situation? Once there's a union contract, everything goes through the contract. Informal arrangements that benefit individuals tend to evaporate.

• You'll pay dues every single month. Roughly two times your hourly rate per month — month after month, year after year — regardless of whether the union does anything useful for you personally in any given period.

• A percentage of those dues goes to politics. The IAM has acknowledged that over 30% of international union dues are spent on political, ideological and other non-representational activities. You may or may not agree with the politics your money funds — in Canada, the IAM is affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress, which has a well-documented political leaning. You don't get a say in how that money is spent.

We Are Not Blind

Let's talk about something that gets glossed over in every all-hands meeting and buried in every employee engagement survey: the revolving door at the senior leadership level. As employees, we are not blind. We see it. We talk about it. And no amount of corporate spin is going to make us un-see it.

There has been a significant amount of senior leadership that has departed over a very short period of time. When that's pointed out, the response tends to be something along the lines of "our retention numbers are strong." And sure — if you massage the data broadly enough, you can make almost anything look like a win on a slide deck. But those of us who have been here long enough know what we've watched walk out the door. Experience. Institutional knowledge. People who built this place.

The honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle — and that middle ground is exactly the problem. Because the market has fundamentally changed. There are now significantly more companies in this region willing to pay competitive, market-rate wages for experienced, high-skill talent. The defence sector in Canada is not what it was five years ago.

With the Canadian government's renewed commitment to increasing defence spending — and a stated focus on Canadian content and small-to-medium sized businesses — the competition for experienced, high-tech workers is only going to intensify. Every new contract awarded to a Canadian defence firm is another company posting jobs that your colleagues are quietly applying to. The talent pipeline flows both ways. L3Harris Wescam is not the only game in town anymore, and anyone in leadership who believes otherwise is not paying attention.

This is the real conversation that needs to happen — between employees and local management, and between local management and corporate. Not with the IAMAW sitting at the table taking 15 minutes to file a grievance every time someone gets a scheduling change. The problem is real. The frustration is legitimate. The solution is direct, honest pressure on the people with the authority to fix it — not a union card.

The Boeing Strike: A Cautionary Tale

You want a recent, real-world example of what the IAMAW does in practice? Look no further than the 2024 Boeing machinists' strike — the most prominent IAM action of the last decade, and one with a detailed public record we can actually examine.

In September 2024, over 33,000 Boeing workers represented by IAM Districts 751 and W24 went on strike after voting to reject a contract that offered a 25% wage increase over four years. Fair enough — they wanted more. That's what negotiations are for.

What followed was 53 days on the picket line. Boeing lost an estimated $9.66 billion USD. Workers lost thousands of dollars in wages — living on $250 USD a week in strike pay while their rent, car payments, and hydro bills continued on their normal schedule.

The final deal: a 38% wage increase spread over four years. Sounds like a win, right? Let's put on our math hats for a moment.

Let's do that math with numbers closer to home. L3Harris Wescam roles in Ontario range broadly — from around $65,000–$98,000 CAD depending on role and experience, based on posted salary data. Say you're a mid-career employee earning $80,000 a year — that's roughly $1,538 a week in gross pay. On strike, you'd be collecting $250 USD per week in IAM strike pay — call it about $340 CAD at current exchange rates. That covers roughly 22% of your normal paycheque. The rest? Gone. For 53 days, that math is a loss of over $11,000 CAD in take-home pay that you will never, ever recover, no matter what percentage raise eventually gets negotiated.

Now, the 38% raise over four years does compound nicely — and yes, eventually those workers come out ahead. Eventually. If they can afford to stay in their house in the meantime. If they don't burn through their savings. If the company doesn't respond to the strike costs by accelerating automation and layoffs. Boeing did, in fact, announce thousands of layoffs in the months following the strike.

And just in case you thought Boeing 2024 was a one-off? In August 2025, another IAM Boeing strike happened — this time District 837 in St. Louis. That one lasted over three months. The workers failed to secure the 401(k) match they demanded, didn't get their $10,000 ratification bonus, and didn't get the wage increases for longtime employees that were central to their demands. Three-plus months on the picket line. For a partial win. Or depending on how you count it, a partial loss.

That's the IAMAW's recent track record in the very industry many of you work in. These are not horror stories from the 1970s — this is 2024 and 2025. This is now.

But here's the part of the Boeing story that nobody in the pro-union camp wants to discuss. Before the 2024 strike — before the picket lines and the $250 a week and the 53 days of lost wages — those Boeing machinists had been paying union dues for over a decade under a contract that hadn't been properly renegotiated since 2008. Sixteen years. That's not a typo.

The 2024 negotiation was the first full-scale contract negotiation between the IAM and Boeing in 16 years. Roughly half the current Boeing workforce had never even been through union bargaining before. In the intervening years, two multi-year contract extensions were bargained secretly between top IAM leaders and the company — without the usual member surveys and participation. The union leadership cut deals with Boeing behind closed doors, without meaningfully consulting the people paying the dues.

Mid-contract bargaining in 2011 and 2013 left Boeing machinists with no raises for a decade. A decade. While they paid their dues every single month. While the IAM collected its fees, funded its political activities, and ran its institutional machinery — the workers it was supposedly representing were sitting on frozen wages. Where was the union then? Cutting quiet deals with management to avoid a strike, guaranteeing Boeing uninterrupted production, and calling it a win.

The IAM didn't fail Boeing workers because it's run by bad people. It failed them because that's what large institutional unions do — they balance their own organizational survival against member interests, and when those two things conflict, the institution wins. Your dues keep the lights on at union headquarters whether your contract is good or not. Your leverage is their leverage — and they decide when and how to use it.

The Bottom Line

Look — the frustration over raises since the Harris merger is real, and the last two years have made it worse. When a parent company reports $2.6 billion USD in cash from operations and the CEO takes home $20.8 million USD, handing Wescam technicians a 2.5% raise is tone-deaf at best. That's a legitimate grievance. It deserves a real fight. But you don't fight it by handing over control of your career to a national union that has 600,000 competing interests and will treat your situation as one file among thousands.

What a union actually gives you: Collective bargaining, seniority-based pay, a grievance process, monthly dues payments, the theoretical protection of strike action, and roughly $340 CAD a week if that strike happens.

What a union actually takes from you: Merit-based raises, individual flexibility, direct relationships with management, the ability to be rewarded for exceptional work above the contract rate — as Ontario's Labour Relations Act, 1995 makes your employer negotiate through the union, not with you — and in many cases, the collegial goodwill that makes a workplace actually function.

L3Harris Wescam is not a sweatshop. It is not 1910. Nobody is being forced to work in dangerous conditions without safety equipment. This is a professional, technical environment where individuals are hired for their skills and — until now — compensated based on their contributions. That's the system worth fighting to improve, not the one worth blowing up.

Putting in years at this company means something. It means you've seen the good years and the lean years. It means you know that every year isn't a banner year — and that the long view matters more than any single raise cycle. It appears the people who've only been here a few years want to burn the system down because the last 24 months did not live up to expectations. They simply do not have the perspective yet. It's that, or sadly they have no ambition — and want a union for the protection of their own sub-par mediocrity. Maybe they'll get there. In the meantime, the rest of us shouldn't be dragged along for the ride.

Just say no.