Victory to the IAM Boeing Strike!

SEPTEMBER 8—Chanting “Union power!”, over 27,000 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) at Boeing commercial airplane factories walked off the job early Saturday for the second time in three years. Pickets went up at plants around the Seattle/Puget Sound region and in Oregon and Kansas after last-minute contract talks collapsed. Angered by subpar contracts in 2002 and 2005, Machinists are ready and determined to fight. “We’re staying out to the end,” one black striker told Workers Vanguard. “It is going to be something like Boeing has never seen before.”

Two days earlier, weeks of protests against the arrogant Boeing Corporation—the world’s largest producer of jetliners and military aircraft—culminated in 87 percent of the workers voting to strike, decisively rejecting the company’s “final offer.” When union leaders followed up by announcing a 48-hour delay in the strike to accommodate federal mediators and the Democratic governor of Washington, they were shouted off stage by outraged Machinists. During the company’s two-day reprieve, some 30 percent of the workforce reportedly stayed home while those on the job worked to rule.

Both sides are digging in for the battle. The aerospace giant is flush with $13 billion in profits over the last five years, and it wants to pocket more by dividing and gutting its unions. Boeing is directing its fire at new-hires, intending to eliminate their pensions and retiree medical benefits altogether, and similarly wants to cut off survivor benefits. Meanwhile, in 2006 the company did not contribute one penny to fund the IAM pension plan but shelled out $522 million for executive pensions. Its wage proposal is grossly inadequate, with more than 4,000 Machinists currently earning less than $30,000 a year because of a tiered wage structure. Another key issue is outsourcing.

All labor has a stake in the strike’s outcome. A hard fight by the Machinists could stem the tide of labor givebacks, breathe life into the manufacturing unions and inspire wider class struggle. The strikers are in a strong position. The demand for fuel-efficient aircraft is high, and Boeing has a record commercial order backlog totaling $275 billion. Its prized 787 Dreamliner is already 14 months late for delivery, and the company is under a lot of pressure to meet its schedule as it faces stiff competition from Airbus in Europe. With the strike so far halting the production of jets, Boeing is losing as much as $120 million a day in revenue.

However, the plants remain open, with other Boeing workers crossing picket lines, including members of the 21,000-strong Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA). As a result, Boeing plans to deliver assembled aircraft and supply customers with spare parts, sapping the effectiveness of the strike. With SPEEA opening its contract negotiations next month, its leaders are not only helping the bosses to undercut the IAM strike, but also setting up the engineers for defeat by instructing the membership to work. SPEEA officials justify this betrayal by hiding behind no-strike contract clauses—to which they agree time and again in negotiations. Picket lines mean don’t cross!

Yesterday, Workers Vanguard salesmen observed a union truck driver stop on the way into the huge Everett, Washington, Boeing site to ask Machinists to set up a picket outside a nearby parts supplier, as she could by contract refuse to cross that picket line. The 2005 strike at Boeing coincided with a strike by Northwest Airlines AMFA mechanics and cleaners. Some Boeing IAM members joined the AMFA pickets, and vice versa, even though IAM officials at Northwest were engaged in brazen strikebreaking. For concrete acts of labor solidarity!

For their part, the IAM officials are keeping the pickets small. Striking workers told WV that assigned picket duty is only once every two weeks. What is needed is to mobilize mass pickets to shut down the plants. The unions at Boeing should set a common contract expiration date. Joint negotiations and strike action would strengthen the unions’ collective muscle and provide a springboard to forming a single industrial union at Boeing, incorporating everyone from engineers to production workers to cleaners. As a first step, the strike should be extended to the roughly 8,000 Machinists who are still on the job in the Boeing Integrated Defense Systems unit. In 2007, Boeing’s revenue from its military orders nearly matched that of its commercial jetliner production. One out, all out!

The aerospace industry as a whole is crucial to the ambitions of U.S. imperialism. The drive by the aerospace bosses to boost their profits, both through ratcheting up the exploitation of labor at home and through “outsourcing,” is inextricably bound up with the projection of U.S. military might abroad. The U.S. proletariat must oppose the imperialist pillage carried out by “its own” government, from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the mounting military provocations against Iran.

But the labor bureaucracy pushes the lie that there is a partnership between labor and the filthy rich capitalists who run the country, that American workers share a common “national interest” with their exploiters. IAM head Tom Buffenbarger expresses this view in his statements around the controversial $40 billion air tanker contract originally awarded by the Pentagon to Northrop Grumman and the parent company of Airbus earlier this year: “How we could turn over the crown jewel of support for our nation’s Air Force to foreign manufacturers is beyond me.”

Like the rest of the labor officialdom, Buffenbarger is committed to defense of the profit system, expressed through the bureaucracy’s loyalty to the capitalist Democratic Party. After Hillary Clinton spoke at the IAM convention today, the union formally endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for imperialist Commander-in-Chief. Illinois Senator Obama is already Boeing’s man. The company, which is headquartered in Chicago, took out a full-page ad congratulating him on the nomination. From Scoop Jackson to Richard Gephardt, Boeing has a long history of keeping Democratic Party politicians in its hip pocket. Gephardt, whom the IAM endorsed for president for the 2004 elections, was hired by Boeing to help negotiate the sellout contract ending the 2005 strike. The labor bureaucracy’s fealty to the Democratic Party has resulted in a lengthy string of defeats for organized labor.

Boeing is further counting on the IAM bureaucrats to divert the power of the striking membership into the trap of protectionism. Boeing is one of the nation’s largest exporters and now has contracts with 22,000 aerospace companies and suppliers worldwide for parts and other services to drive down the cost of production and increase profits. But protectionism only gives aid to the company’s bottom line, directing workers’ anger against “foreign labor” instead of against the greedy bosses. What the strikers need is a fighting alliance of Boeing workers in the U.S., Japan and everywhere else that jet parts are produced—international workers solidarity, not the “Fly Made in the USA” bleating of chauvinist trade-union tops.

Today, with more than one-third of Boeing’s active fleet worldwide containing parts and assemblies built in China, the IAM bureaucrats are especially exercised over the possibility of “technology transfer” to China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state where capitalist rule was overthrown by the 1949 Revolution. As we wrote in “Protectionism vs. Class Struggle: Exchange on Boeing Strike” (WV No. 634, 1 December 1995) in response to a letter to Workers Vanguard from a Portland IAM official, “The IAM leadership has placed itself at the center of an anti-Communist campaign against ‘totalitarianism’ in China. This dovetails all too neatly with the counterrevolutionary designs of U.S. imperialism…. Not only would the restoration of capitalism in the most populous country on the planet mean even more ‘cheapening of labor,’ it would necessarily bring to white heat the rivalries over the spoils between U.S. and Japanese imperialism.” It is the duty of workers in the U.S. and internationally to defend China against capitalist restoration and imperialist attack.

The 2002 contract gave Boeing the opening to use outside companies to deliver parts to the factory floor, work previously handled by the IAM. This contract was rejected by a majority of Machinists. But it went into effect because a bureaucratic provision in the IAM constitution requires a two-thirds majority for a strike, which was not achieved. Today the non-union North Carolina subcontractor New Breed delivers parts for the 787 assembly lines. Meanwhile, the Dreamliner’s wings and fuselage are manufactured in Italy and Japan and by other companies in Kansas and South Carolina. IAM officials want additional language in the contract furthering the union’s ability to underbid outsourced work, i.e., an opportunity to push speedup on its own members. “We’re trying to show them a way to run the business better,” Buffenbarger said. “We can save them money, or make them money” (Seattle Times, 7 September).

Instead of participating in a race to the bottom, the IAM should launch an all-out campaign to organize the increasing numbers of non-union, lower-wage aerospace workers in the U.S. One place to start is the new and growing “Southern aerospace corridor.” Any organizing drive in the “right to work” South, where the racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation has always served to head off labor struggle, must center on the fight for black rights as well as the rights of immigrant workers. To prepare for the battles ahead, there needs to be a fight to replace the labor bureaucracy 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 fight is part of forging a workers party capable of leading struggles not only to improve present conditions but to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery. Victory to the IAM Boeing strike!