Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to Win!

Labor: All Out to Support
Boeing Machinists Strike!

SEATTLE / PORTLAND, September 15 – “Like a lit match into gasoline.” That’s how workers on strike outside the giant Boeing aircraft manufacturing complex in Everett, Washington described to us the reaction of the rank and file when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 751 bureaucrats tried to sell the company’s offer at the union meeting before the vote on September 12. The workers were not going to take it. Despite the strong appeals by the District leadership to take the deal, over 94% of the membership voted “no” to the tentative agreement, 96% to strike. The next day, Friday, September 13, the historic strike was on. Now all labor should pitch in to help win it.

This is major class battle, not just for Boeing workers but for unions across the country. The membership has been hopping mad for months. On July 17, upwards of 25,000 IAM members held a strike authorization vote in the T-Mobile Park, home of the Seattle Mariners, packing the stands up to the rafters. 99% voted for a strike. For days leading up to the September 12 contract vote, there were marches of hundreds inside the plant calling to strike. As it became clear that the tentative agreement wouldn’t fly, the leadership added another box to the ballot to vote on going on strike, saying that if that didn’t pass by a two-thirds majority, the contract would be automatically ratified. But instead of being intimidated, the membership voted near-unanimously to strike. This is a real labor revolt.

The fight is on. On one side, the giant “too big to fail” monopoly, gorging itself at the trough of billions of dollars in government subsidies, joined at the hip with the U.S. imperialist war machine, while cutting corners on safety and quality to chase a quick buck for shareholders. On the other side, the workers without whom not a wheel can turn. The key demands – a 40% wage hike to make up for losses to inflation and to restore pensions – are issues facing unions everywhere in the U.S. The Boeing workers are fighting for all working people, and all of labor should come out to support them, big time. Send contingents to beef up picket lines, hit the streets with real solidarity action!

The Boeing strike has been 16 years in the making. In 2008, the Machinists struck for 57 days, winning limited wage gains and pushing back company demands for givebacks on health insurance, in exchange for a no-strike clause in the contract. That’s the last time Boeing workers got a pay hike, aside from cost-of-living adjustments that don’t keep up with inflation. Then, in a 2013 reopener, the company demanded an end to defined-benefit pensions (introducing 401K plans for new hires, and for everyone from 2016 on). It threatened to take production of new planes out of state if the union didn’t agree. The IAM tops caved, but Boeing workers in District 751 voted down the giveback deal by a two-to-one majority. The leadership then forced a revote on a barely altered offer when many workers were out on winter break, and got a bare 51-to-49% majority.

By conceding to Boeing’s union-busting blackmail, the Boeing workers were saddled with a contract that saw their living standards gutted by inflation. Starting pay at Boeing is as low as $15.74 an hour. That’s more than $1 less than the base rate for fast-food workers at McDonald’s in Washington. “At Panda Express, they’re making as much as a grade-three mechanic,” a lead worker told the Seattle Times (12 September). Boeing workers have endured years of humiliation while bean-counters forced them to put speed over safety, with predictable disastrous results. Boeing has become notorious for its disregard for safety.

On January 5, after faulty repair work at a Boeing plant, an emergency door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 a few minutes after takeoff from Portland. In February and March, a Congressional report on crashes of 737 Max airliners in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, a Federal Aviation Administration audit and testimony in back-to-back Senate hearings produced a steady drumbeat of evidence on how Boeing failed to meet quality standards, didn’t report safety issues and retaliated against whistleblowers who complained. And in June, two NASA astronauts blasted off on a test flight of the Boeing Starliner capsule for the International Space Station, where they have since been stranded due to problems with thrusters and helium leaks.

Meanwhile, credit rating agencies have classified Boeing’s debt as only a step above “junk” status and are considering lowering it in case of a long strike, which would greatly increase the company’s borrowing costs. Faced with a discredited management and having unprecedented unity in the union ranks, the Machinists are in a strong position to fight. Workers want pensions back so they can retire in security. They want to be paid enough to live where they work and to make up for over a decade of decline. They want to take pride in their vital work. The big business media tries to paint the workers as greedy. But millions of working people who have seen past gains ground up see it differently: finally, we are fighting back. So let’s win this strike!

How to win it? Business as usual won’t do it. The bureaucrats’ refrain, “one day longer, one day stronger,” is simply false – it’s necessary to hit the Boeing bosses hard, from the start. That means building huge pickets and bringing out the power of labor to defend the lines. The industrial unions in this country were built by mass pickets and sit-down strikes that brought production to a standstill. Teamsters are reportedly refusing to cross the strike lines. Good for them. All deliveries and shipments must be stopped. And as Boeing threatens layoffs, beat them to the punch and stop scabbing by shutting the whole place down. Strikebreaking is not an “individual choice”: when the union decides on collective action, everyone must respect that. It’s a basic labor principle: Picket lines mean don’t cross, period!

Plus SPEEA, the engineers’ union, should walk out now. Machinists and engineers both lost their pensions in 2013 in a one-two punch by Boeing. The company says their contract forbids it? Call their bluff. Where is Boeing going to find hundreds of qualified replacements? On Mars perhaps? They would have to fix their defective Starliners first. The answer to management’s corner-cutting and safety-last policies is to demand union control of safety and quality checks, with production workers and engineers working together, in the interests of airline passengers as well.

Send in the reinforcements now. This is a fight for the whole working class. Even if Boeing puts a few more dollars on the table, that would only bring Machinists to the entirely inadequate levels that UPS and auto workers “won” in their contracts, which didn’t eliminate pay “tiers” or poverty pay for part-timers. And the company won’t restore defined-benefit pensions without a knock-down fight. But Boeing Machinists are in a position to win that fight if they hang tough and bring production to a full stop. A strike to bring back pensions would galvanize workers throughout the U.S., the way the fight against Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation in Wisconsin did in 2011, to the point where a statewide general strike was posed.

Every union in Washington and Oregon should assign its members to picket duty at Boeing, now. Build hundreds-strong picket lines so massive and militant that no scab dares to cross. We saw in Seattle just three months ago how one of the most powerful unions, IBEW Local 46, suffered a humiliating defeat after their strike was undercut by scabbing, including by their own members who were ordered to cross picket lines by their own union leaders. We also saw how the brother and sister Machinists at Weyerhaeuser in Longview were hung out to dry last year as IAM leaders forbade effective pickets of the nearby port where longshore workers had promised to respect picket lines. Solidarity in deeds, not words, is the order of the day.

Anyone who stands in the way of united labor action must step aside. After the repeated sellouts of Boeing workers by IAM leaders, both from the International and now the District Lodge, in order to wage a strike to win, the bargaining and conduct of the strike should be in the hands of an elected strike committee, with delegates from all units who can be recalled by the members at any time, to shut Boeing’s operations down tight, including Boeing’s Military Delivery Center at Boeing Field.

In 1981, the defeat of the PATCO air controllers strike signaled decades of decline in union power. Back then, IAM president William Winpisinger (who even claimed to be a “democratic socialist”), shamefully ordered union members to scab on the strike. The 2024 Boeing strike can mark a turning point for labor in the opposite direction, winning the support of millions of working people who have been ground down, living from paycheck to paycheck, while the bosses rake in the dough (Boeing’s ex-CEO got a 45% pay raise last year, to $32.8 million, before heading for the door). But the Boeing strike, like any real class battle, is political and must be fought politically.

The Democrats in Washington, D.C. will pull out all the stops to send strikers back to work before the November election, in order to elect Kamala Harris. They’ve already dispatched a federal mediator. Maybe they will even invoke “national security.” But the Democrats are no “friends of labor,” even though Biden poses as “the most pro-labor president in history.” Like the Republicans they are strikebreakers, following the dictates of capital. Ask a railroad worker. They’ll tell you how in December 2022 the Democrats in the White House and Congress ganged up to outlaw a strike by rail workers who were demanding paid sick days! Republican Donald Trump is a certifiably unhinged racist bigot, but in nearly every major city like Seattle it is Democrats who are the bosses of the racist killer cops.

The drastic decline of the labor movement in recent years is the result of the late-1940s Cold War purge of the “reds” who built the mass industrial unions in the ’30s. The bureaucrats that took their place are chained to capitalism, centrally through their subordination to the Democratic Party. That decaying capitalist system is ripping up past labor gains, condemning the working class to death and destruction, as when millions died during the COVID pandemic. The Internationalist Group and Class Struggle Workers – Portland call for labor to break with the Democrats, Republicans and all parties of the bosses and build a workers party of class struggle fighting for a workers government. We also call for labor action to stop arms shipments to Israel. Who profits when Boeing workers’ skills and craftsmanship are exploited for the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza or the insane buildup for World War III against Russia and China? Not the working people, for sure! A workers government would expropriate Boeing and the other parasitic monopolies.

The giant corporations and their government, whether under Democrats and Republicans, can only bring war, falling living standards, police repression and misery. The Boeing strike can be a rallying point for labor, for African American, Latino and all working people who are being sacrificed for the capitalist crisis. It can win the support of the students in nearby campuses whose free-speech rights were trampled by campus administrators and police as they protested against the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. Workers and students together can have real power. Even Boeing and its government backers are no match for the full power of the working class if it is unchained and mobilized as a champion of those exploited and oppressed by capital. Victory to the Boeing strike! ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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