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	Workers Vanguard No. 926	5 December 2008

IAM Tops Cave In to Boeing

Strike Settlement Opens Door to Job Cuts

At the outset of the 57-day Boeing strike, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 751 president Tom Wroblewski declared: “We certainly want to prevent them [Boeing] from bringing nonunion people into the factory.” The 27,000 Boeing Machinists sure could have, but the union tops folded on the key issue of outsourcing and scuttled the walkout. After eight weeks of struggle and sacrifice, workers were handed a settlement that allows the aerospace giant to continue to contract out work as before and to give non-union suppliers access to the plants. While not a crushing defeat, the back-to-work deal was no victory either.

Here was an exceptional opportunity to land a powerful blow for all labor. The world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, Boeing is awash in $13 billion in profits from the last five years and has a record backlog of commercial aircraft orders. In early September, 87 percent of the Machinists decisively rejected the company’s “final offer” and voted to strike, shouting union officials off the stage when a 48-hour delay was announced. After two successive concessionary contracts, Machinists were determined to fight Boeing’s giveback demands in spite of the tanking economy. Bringing production to a crawl, the strike had the bosses hurting: Boeing lost billions in revenue and its missed aircraft deliveries could cost it billions more.

But in playing by the bosses’ rules, the IAM bureaucrats handcuffed the striking Machinists. Instead of mass picket lines, the lines were kept small. Meanwhile, union officials alibied engineers, Teamsters and other Boeing workers going into the plants by invoking “no-strike” contract clauses. This made it possible for the company to ship out assembled aircraft and continue to prepare the new 787 Dreamliner for ground tests. Some 8,000 Machinists who work under a separate contract in Boeing’s high-revenue Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) military unit were kept on the job. All along, the union tops steered clear of advancing working-class solidarity by linking up with other aerospace workers, such as the striking IAM members at Vought Aircraft Industries in Nashville, Tennessee. An opportunity to stem the tide of labor givebacks was squandered.

Left to twist in the wind by the union tops, IAM members on November 1 voted three-to-one for a slightly sweetened version of Boeing’s earlier “final offer.” In a testament to the strike’s impact, the union did head off Boeing’s attempt to squeeze it for new concessions, including higher health care payments, which were instead frozen at the level of the 2002 contract. But nothing was won to advance the living standards or working conditions of the membership.

At the vote and afterwards, Machinists expressed many reservations about the settlement to Workers Vanguard. The wage and pension provisions were nearly identical to what was in the pre-strike offer, with janitors denied a general wage increase altogether. Significantly, the contract retains the two-tier wage structure with its six-year progression that has 4,000 members, most newer, earning less than $30,000 annually. Such schemes divide workers by pitting them against each other, undercutting union solidarity and struggle when there should be equal pay for equal work. We were told that many workers reluctantly accepted the deal in response to the financial distress of the new hires.

When unanimously endorsing the settlement, the IAM leadership boasted that the deal “will provide job security” for IAM members. Not likely, as the union tops opened the door to more outsourcing and job losses. The contract preserves an uneasy status quo issuing from the 2005 strike: the company’s use of contractors, rather than Machinists, to bring parts directly to the shop floor, which was a central dispute in this year’s strike. The non-union North Carolina outfit New Breed will still make deliveries directly to the Dreamliner.

Posing the question of whether or not this could be declared a gain for the union, Bill Virgin of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (29 October), aptly answered: “Well, yes and no, sort of, and it depends and maybe not.” Boeing’s verdict was given by spokesman Tim Healy: “There is nothing in this contract that impairs our ability to deliver parts in the factory, including right up to the airplane” (Seattle Times, 29 October).

The reality did not deter the reformist left from sounding like the water boys for the labor bureaucrats that they are. After hedging its bets prior to the vote, the International Socialist Organization in its article, “Boeing Strike Ends in Union Win” (Socialist Worker, 4 November), declared that whatever its “shortcomings” the contract “will slow the bleeding” of jobs lost to outsourcing. In a November 14 online posting, the Workers World Party chimed in that “despite some compromises,” the settlement “advanced the cause of the workers’ right to a job.”

Actually defending jobs requires taking the fight to the bosses, but the union bureaucrats had no intention of lifting a finger to win back the Dreamliner parts delivery jobs. The union tops hid behind a newfound lack of union “jurisdiction” over this work—even though the union had in 2005 already regained the delivery jobs for the other aircraft models that were given away in 2002. Instead, as IAM president Tom Buffenbarger declared from the start: “We’re trying to show them a way to run the business better,” adding, “We can save them money, or make them money” (Seattle Times, 7 September). Fulfilling his wishes, the settlement allows union bureaucrats to bid for jobs that the company plans to outsource to non-union contractors. Now the union can be a player in the race to the bottom.

By capitulating on the issue of outsourcing, the union tops emboldened the company to begin job-slashing. With the ink barely dry on the deal covering the Machinists there, Boeing on November 19 announced 800 layoffs at its IDS military aircraft modification plant in Wichita, Kansas. The next day, Boeing’s CEO issued a memo to all employees warning of job cuts in 2009, citing the cancellation and deferral of orders amid the global recession.

In general, the capitalists will exploit cheaper labor where it is available. The thousands of companies manufacturing parts for and supplying services to Boeing span the globe. Thus it is crucial for the Machinists, who assemble the aircraft, to increase their working-class allies by organizing the unorganized in the U.S. and forging bonds of solidarity with aerospace workers overseas. On strike since September, some one thousand Machinists at Vought’s Nashville plant, where parts are produced for Boeing’s main competitor, the European conglomerate Airbus, have received solidarity statements from European unions. This raises the possibility of international unity in struggle.

Standing in the way is the labor bureaucracy’s chauvinist protectionism and reliance on capitalist politicians, especially in the Democratic Party. The IAM campaigned heavily for Barack Obama throughout the strike, and District 751 leaders encouraged workers to vote for a slate of Democrats and other representatives of the class enemy. Calling off the strike just days before the elections, the District 751 tops then hailed the results.

The November issue of 751’s Aero Mechanic enthuses: “President-elect Obama’s administration is much more likely to ensure American workers build American Tankers.” The controversial $35 billion military air tanker contract was originally given to the parent company of Airbus earlier this year but was retracted and remains unawarded after Boeing protested. Machinists must beware the trap of the bureaucracy’s flag-waving chauvinism, which spits on aerospace workers in other countries as well as IAM members working for Airbus suppliers. Sold to union members with the lie that they have shared interests with their own exploiters, protectionist measures do nothing but boost the company’s profits. While Obama might be more likely to grant Boeing the contract, it is because the former Illinois Senator is supported by the Chicago-based company.

As its role in the tanker dispute shows, the bureaucracy has centered its efforts to win aerospace jobs on support for expanded military projects. It is in the interest of all workers to draw a hard line in opposition to U.S. imperialism, including the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. With Boeing increasingly exporting work to China, the IAM tops also bash China to the benefit of the imperialists, who want to overthrow the 1949 Chinese Revolution and restore the rule of capital. Workers should defend the Chinese deformed workers state against the imperialist powers and internal counterrevolution.

A first step to reversing the hemorrhaging of union jobs, and ending speculation that Boeing will move its plants to the South, is to organize the unorganized. Notably, workers at Vought in North Charleston, South Carolina, where much of the fuselage for the Dreamliner is manufactured, recently voted for IAM representation. Union activists should seize on this breakthrough in the “right to work” South to launch an aggressive organizing drive, from New Breed and other non-union suppliers in Washington state to the growing “Southern aerospace corridor.” Any serious campaign in the South, where the racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation has always served to spike class struggle, would have to take up the fight for black rights as well as the rights of immigrant workers.

The situation cries out for a hard-fought campaign. But amid meager efforts to organize Seattle-area Boeing suppliers, the District 751 tops prefer to lobby the government to get it to require an illusory “neutrality” from these companies, which is nothing but an attempt to find common cause with the Democrats where there is none. Workers are paying the price for such class collaboration. There needs to be a fight to replace these bureaucrats with a leadership committed to mobilizing labor’s power, independently of the capitalist state and politicians, in the interests of all the exploited and oppressed. This is an essential part of building a multiracial workers party to fight for a workers government.