Down With Bosses’ “Divide and Rule” Schemes!

In the presidential elections, many Boeing Machinists, fed up with the liberal status quo, voted for Trump. They expressed distrust of the Democrats after being heavily bruised by the inflation of the last four years, made worse by the fact that Boeing has long had Democratic Party politicians in its hip pocket. A good portion of these Trump supporters are militantly pro-union and keenly aware of their ability to shut down the company. They dislike self-righteous liberals who claim that Trump voters are the problem and judge the Republican standard-bearer to be a “lesser evil,” whose economic policies will supposedly provide a greater trickle-down benefit.

But Trump is no answer. While he will make life miserable for the Democrats, he will make it even more miserable for working people. He is backed by Wall Street bankers and a growing set of elites, like Elon Musk, who prefer his brand of rule, not least his vicious anti-union stance. The IAM leadership—by throwing in their lot with the Democratic Party and burying the strike—only contributed to making Trump great again. In opposition to both the reactionary candidates, Harris and Trump, we urged a vote to the working-class alternative provided by the presidential ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

The policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans fuel divisions in the working class. Trump regularly rails against newly arrived immigrant workers—perhaps the most vulnerable section of the class—and Harris proposed her own set of harsh anti-immigrant measures. The liberal elite wag their finger at white workers as hopeless bigots and harden the partisan lines, all the better to mask the role of the entire ruling class in driving immigrants from their homelands and maintaining them as a cheap pool of labor to drive down everyone’s conditions. The pitting of migrants vs. more established immigrants vs. native-born workers is a ruse to put workers at each other’s throats and prevent them from banding together against their common class enemy. During the strike, foreign-born as well as Trump-supporting Machinists were on the frontlines, seeking to escalate the struggle. The defense of working people in the crosshairs today is crucial to preparing the defense of the union tomorrow.

As the experience of the Machinists shows, if union members are not fighting to bring everyone up, then they are left open to division and defeat. To steal the pension in 2013-14, Boeing drove a wedge between new hires and senior workers with the aid of the IAM leadership. A sizable signing bonus was inserted in the giveback contract to entice the support of new hires, and the union tops scheduled the vote when many senior workers were away on vacation. It passed by the slimmest of margins. This time around, Boeing attempted similar tricks, and it succeeded in imposing a probationary period on new hires for the first time—a setback that puts them at the complete mercy of the bosses and carries the danger of undermining future union struggle.

A leadership committed to transforming the union into a fighting force for the interests of the working class would oppose all the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes—and put forward a way for the union to defend the most vulnerable and break down those divisions. For example, to bridge the divide between new hires and senior workers, it would strive not only to revive the pension and abolish probation, but also to institute union-run, company-paid training to ensure all new hires are up to speed on safety and union standards.

The IAM leadership, though, plays right into the hands of divide-and-rule. This is also evident in its failed effort to organize Boeing’s North Charleston plant—a vital task to counter the outsourcing threats that have bedeviled the Machinists. Thus far, every organizing drive in this plant has faltered because the bosses pit workers against one another along regional and racial lines.

Anti-union forces paint the IAM as a vehicle of liberal Democrats that will leave workers in the South worse off. Union officials give this narrative some legs not only by attaching the IAM to the Democrats, but also by having called into question the skill of South Carolina workers in the name of defending jobs in Washington state before the National Labor Relations Board. What they refuse to do is mobilize working-class action against layoffs or segregation on the job at Boeing South Carolina—which would go a long way toward uniting the workforce behind the union. A fighting IAM leadership would have dispatched a delegation to North Charleston to recruit workers there to join the strike and the union.

The union tops’ avoidance of the fight against racial oppression is a great gift to the bosses. It not only preserves the South as a vast “open shop,” but also brings the entire working class down in every other way. White workers will not be able to make any lasting gains so long as a layer of the working class is oppressed beneath them. If the multiracial working class remains atomized—fighting for the same piece of a shrinking pie—it will remain trapped in a cycle of defeat. Instead, the multiracial working class must fight for the whole pie. To meet their needs and achieve their own emancipation from wage slavery, white workers must champion black liberation. In turn, black workers will not be able to throw off their oppression—which is embedded in capitalist rule—absent integrated class struggle.