Boeing bosses are staring down the barrel.

The twists and turns of the past week paint a picture of managers badly wrong-footed by the depth of fury among workers who tossed out a 25% pay rise deal and launched strike action.

“They probably didn’t think that we had enough people for the strike,” Kushal Varma, a Boeing mechanic, told Reuters. “But this is a movement of people who are willing to put their livelihoods on the line to get what’s fair.”