Boeing engineers: Vote YES to the strike! Form action committees to enforce the will of the members!
The World Socialist Website calls on the more than 33,000 Boeing machinists in Washington and Oregon to vote “YES” today to authorize a strike with the largest possible majority.
But that is only the first step. Workers must organize immediately to enforce the result of their vote and overcome any attempt by the International Association of Machinists bureaucracy to ignore the will of the members and keep the workers employed after the contract expires. If all of the workers’ demands are not met by September 12, a strike must take place that will completely shut down all production, including that of the non-union plant in South Carolina.
The fight at Boeing, a textbook example of corporate criminality, must become the spearhead of an offensive by the entire working class to defend its interests. Boeing workers must appeal to the broadest possible support of the working class throughout the Pacific Northwest, the United States and the world.
Boeing wants to force workers to pay the cost of its criminal negligence. The company’s shares have fallen more than 27 percent, or $41.5 billion, since the beginning of the year. The aerospace giant is refusing to restore its machinists’ pensions and grant wage increases to make up for more than a decade of stagnation and decline due to inflation.
Boeing is also refusing to accept one of the main demands made by workers on behalf of passengers: the restoration of the hundreds of quality and safety jobs that Boeing has eliminated over the past decade. The company’s stance during the labor negotiations belies any public claims by management that it cares at all about “quality” or “safety” when they stand in the way of corporate profits.
The International Labor Alliance of Laborers is calling on Boeing workers to take matters into their own hands. The decades of concessions made by the IAM, which have led to massive job losses, destruction of workers’ livelihoods, and unsafe conditions, can only be reversed by decisive action by the workers themselves. A strike led by rank-and-file workers would garner tremendous support from workers across the U.S. and internationally, including from Airbus workers facing tens of thousands of layoffs.
Against the war and the two corporate parties
Boeing workers are fighting not only against the corporation, but also against the Biden administration and the two parties controlled by the corporations. Boeing is a major defense contractor that produces F-15 fighter jets, V-22 attack helicopters and B-52 bombers. A strike would be a major blow to the White House’s continued support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and for American imperialism’s rapidly escalating military confrontations with Russia and China.
These wars are not being fought for “democracy” but for corporate profits. That is, they are the same selfish social interests that are behind the dismantling of security measures and the relentless war on working-class jobs, living standards and social programs.
On July 9, Brian Bryant, president of IAM International, issued a statement reiterating his support for the doddering war criminal Biden, claiming he would “protect our democracy and economy” and “strengthen national defense.” Biden had previously appointed Bryant, along with Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, to the President’s Export Council, where he sits with top American business CEOs and the Secretary of the Air Force to plan economic war against China and other rivals.
Biden summed up his relationship with the highly paid union bureaucrats recently when he told the executive board of the AFL-CIO that they were his “domestic NATO,” that is, his key backers in the wars abroad and the war against the working class at home. That role was on display in July 2022, when the IAM blocked a strike by 2,500 workers at three defense plants in St. Louis and rammed through a collective agreement that was virtually identical to one that workers had overwhelmingly rejected a week earlier.
That is why the fight for a comprehensive strike requires building rank-and-file committees under the democratic control of the workers themselves who will not bow to Biden and his henchmen in the IAM bureaucracy.
For workers’ control over production!
The IAM bureaucracy continues to repeat the mantra that it is trying to “save Boeing from itself.” But the goal is not to “help” management avoid the consequences of its own criminal actions; it is to put workers in control of all important safety and quality control issues.
Years of austerity aimed at increasing shareholder value at the expense of human lives have deprived management of the right to make these decisions. In fact, they cannot even be asked, let alone seriously addressed, within the framework of the profit system.
Workers are not beholden to profit interests and know exactly how to build aircraft safely and to a high quality. They must insist that they have the final say in all aspects of production. This is enforced by the right to stop work if management tries to make them work in an unsafe manner.
Decision-making power over quality inspector staffing levels, training standards, and other key issues must be exercised exclusively by committees made up of trusted rank-and-file workers. Unlike the sham worker committees made up of Boeing and IAM officials, these rank-and-file worker committees will prioritize worker safety and welfare, not corporate profits.
The demand for workers’ control of production must be linked to the fight to transfer Boeing into public ownership, democratically run by the workers. This privately owned key sector of American industry is nothing more than a plaything of finance capital. The only solution is to completely eliminate these parasitic social interests and run Boeing in the public interest.
American society has been driven to the brink of collapse by endless wars and capitalist greed for profit. Just four days before the strike vote, Biden responded to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump by declaring that there was “no place in America” for such acts.
This is absurd not only because Trump has incessantly promoted political violence and attempted to overturn the outcome of the January 6, 2021, U.S. election, but also because Biden’s own administration has absolved Boeing of responsibility for the suspicious “suicides” of two Boeing whistleblowers, John “Mitch” Barnett and Joshua Dean. The government has also absolved Boeing of responsibility for two fatal plane crashes by reaching an agreement to avoid prosecution that includes a fine in the form of a slap on the wrist and a token federal safety oversight.
Workers cannot rely on the Democrats, the Republicans, or the IAM bureaucracy to defend their interests. If there is to be a fight against Boeing, workers must organize it themselves. That means joining the growing network of action committees in factories and workplaces across the U.S. and around the world, whose activities are coordinated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees, democratically controlled by the workers themselves, are the new organizations through which workers can organize their resistance to capitalist exploitation and advance their collective interests.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce meet again in Amsterdam
Will Strike’s new Bitcoin app revolutionise British payments? This is what the data says
Travis Kelce remembers how Taylor Swift made him fall in love with her
About The Author
