How We Fought to Escalate Boeing Strike

For the duration of the recent Boeing Machinist strike, representatives of Workers Vanguard were in the Puget Sound region. Through a series of political struggles on the ground, we encouraged the founding and activity of a strike committee, IAM 751 Mobilize!, which brought together Machinists who wanted to escalate in the face of the union bureaucracy’s demobilization of the strike. This development is a testament to the vital role of leadership in struggle, pointing the way forward at every turn against the bureaucracy’s strategy and the divisions it helped create, including between new hires and senior workers.

A Strategy Worthy of the Machinists

We first intervened after IAM District 751 president Jon Holden recommended the pre-strike offer as “historic” despite its complete inadequacy. We sought to channel rank-and-file anger into a rejection of Holden’s entire strategy—which flowed from his pro-capitalist outlook—by providing an alternative rooted in class independence and the fight for union dominance over Boeing. Our aim was to fuse the militancy of the workers with conscious political leadership.

We came across plenty of Machinists, from MAGA supporters to the socialist-minded, who wanted to make a fight of it against Boeing. We not only argued against the tricks of the Holden leadership and “divide and rule,” but also laid out concrete steps to take at each juncture. This approach gained us a hearing—and even earned us a grudging respect from fighting Machinists who are far from sharing our socialist views. In particular, we stressed that the key to victory was to break out of the restraints placed on the strike by a union leadership aligned with liberal Democrats.

This alignment ensured the IAM tops were not going to create ripples for the bosses and their kept politicians. Their corresponding strike strategy was “one day longer, one day stronger,” making it a waiting game. Supposedly, all that mattered is that the longer the strike dragged on, the more the damage to Boeing’s profits. As such, the strength of the picket lines was immaterial to the strike’s outcome.

But this strategy could only bring defeat. One reason was that the longer the strike dragged on, the greater the economic pressure on individual Machinists. This pressure caused hardship, sowed division among the union membership and eventually forced the swallowing of an insufficient contract. Making matters worse, the union bureaucracy set strike pay so low ($250 a week) that many Machinists were feeling the pinch a couple weeks in.

Other left groups, like Kshama Sawant-led Workers Strike Back (WSB), spotted the problem of the low strike pay and centered their intervention around calls for its increase. No doubt, strike pay needed to be higher. But in and of itself, greater strike pay would only allow the Machinists to hold out a little longer. The WSB was simply proposing a more robust version of Holden’s strategy. But the strike was never going to win by continuing further down the track laid by the IAM leadership.

“One day longer, one day stronger” has a fundamental flaw. If one measures success by the yardstick of lost revenue, Boeing got clobbered, because the strike was perhaps the costliest in the U.S. this century. But Boeing is not some mom-and-pop operation; it is the very embodiment of monopoly capital in a strategic industry with a massive military division. The strike was not going to proceed linearly down the “one day longer” track and make the aerospace giant capitulate to demands so damaging to its interests as restoration of pensions, end to forced overtime and the like. In other words, Boeing was not going to sit by and lose a war of attrition—and the bosses’ government would not let that happen either. No, Boeing and its allies would escalate before it simply conceded.

And that is, in fact, what happened. Boeing decided it had had enough; the CEO threatened to bring in scabs from around the world, move production to non-union plants and even burn the company to the ground to break the strike. Predictably, the Holden team folded. It was not going to engage in a head-on confrontation in the shadow of the elections, especially since it was heavily invested in a Harris victory.

So, Boeing’s threat to escalate worked. The only thing that was going to change the equation, at any point, in favor of the IAM was for the union to escalate: e.g., build mass picket lines, cut off parts deliveries, organize Boeing’s non-union operations. Doing so required rejecting Holden’s strategy, actively breaking down divisions among the Machinists and drawing other Boeing employees, trade unionists and the flying public into the struggle by appealing to their common interest against the class enemy. What was needed was a mobilization of working-class force to make Boeing capitulate and put the union on top.

We motivated the need to organize the strike on this basis in five strike supplements, each outlining a plan of action for a particular juncture. The first, popularly titled “Save Us All from Boeing!”, urged Machinists to take matters into their own hands and impose their will on a company in crisis. It sparked interest in working with us to form a class-struggle pole in the strike. The second argued for an escalation to win and proposed turning picket lines into workers assemblies to get the ball rolling on debate over strike strategy. That became a focus of our activity for some time—to find and bring together fighting Machinists.

Sectarians and Strike Committees: Never the Two Shall Meet

Early on, we came across two supporters of the Internationalist Group (IG) on the picket lines, who denounced our intervention into the strike as substitutionalism. For the IG, the notion of revolutionaries attempting to leverage anger at the existing union leadership’s sabotage of a strike to build a new, class-struggle leadership to advance the interests of the workers was beyond the pale! It was like staring in the mirror of our sectarian past. They preferred to make grand declarations of class-struggle intent with no point of application in reality. But socialists who are opposed to shaping the class struggle in favor of spreading good ideas are not socialists but, at best, preachers.

Workers will embrace socialist ideas because they are clearly demonstrated to make a difference in the living struggle, not simply because they sound nice. Our strongest rebuke to the IG and like-minded sectarians was not what we said that day, but what we did shortly after. Until then, Machinists who wanted to participate in what became Mobilize! had been unable to sit down together to plan common work. So, an action was conceived and organized: turning Holden’s October strike rally into a mass picket line. The action provided a focus and a cause—something that could tangibly impact the struggle—and was the launching pad for the rank-and-file committee. In contrast, the union bureaucracy brought workers out to the Seattle IAM hall to let off steam and subject them to Democratic Party politicians.

Based on our own experience on the picket lines, we knew there would be plenty of Machinists pissed off at Holden in the crowd and looking to deliver a blow against Boeing. If anything, we underestimated the potential response, having failed to consider the possibility of rallying the numbers to set up a mass picket line to stop scabs. That was a missed opportunity—to immediately attempt to generate support for such action among the roughly 250 marchers. Nonetheless, the action was a major success—and three days later a group of Machinists met for Mobilize!’s first meeting. This demonstrated the force of program that matches the objective interests of the class.

Opportunists Abandon the Working Class

Mobilize! was established and consolidated as a united front of Machinists and their working-class allies who wanted to escalate the strike in opposition to the union leadership. Striking workers and their supporters, irrespective of political affiliation, were welcome to work jointly in that direction and in the process establish a way forward for the strike through open debate. We were confident that our strategy would alone prove capable of winning the core strike demands and catapulting the working class into a better position. We argued our case and engaged in exchanges on everything from strike strategy to the elections and Palestinian struggle, without drawing organizational lines.

The united-front conception matched the needs of the Machinists, who were eager for advice—even competing advice—in order to figure out how best to confront Boeing. Some of the strongest defenders of the united front were Machinists who had an association with other left groups. They recognized that we had something unique to offer. For example, when it came to Boeing’s military operations, WSB advised that it was not in the interests of the workers to produce military material, while we advised that it was in the interests of the workers to establish union control over where that material ends up. The former is born of liberal moralism, throws workers out of a job and contributes nothing to anti-militarist struggle; the latter is part of a perspective to strengthen the union and put workers in charge of the plants and society at large.

WSB had some support among the Machinists. But during the mass picket action, their organization was busy elsewhere building a rally for liberal politician Jill Stein to take place later the same day. At the Stein event, their speakers neglected to even mention the action. Shortly after, the Seattle-centered WSB abandoned the striking Machinists to stump for Stein in Michigan. WSB had publicized another strike committee, which we repeatedly urged to merge with Mobilize!. Instead, the WSB-promoted committee became a nonfactor. WSB had a clear choice—the workers or the liberals—and its actions left no doubt where its fundamental priorities lie. WSB’s opportunism put it in the exact same place as the sectarians—abdicating leadership.

Opportunists Split the Working Class

Unity in action is important to deliver the strongest punch for a cause. It is also a powerful sorting-out tool. Toward the strike’s end, we twice issued supplements to rally opposition to rotten contract offers in conjunction with Mobilize!. The first effort was successful, giving Mobilize! some momentum. A heightening of the struggle for a strong strike against the union bureaucracy was immediately posed, because the Holden gang was clearly going to try again to bulldoze the strike before Election Day (and it did).

In the lead-up to the sellout, an apologist for the IAM bureaucracy within Mobilize! went on the offensive. Having failed to convince Mobilize! to become an adjunct of the bureaucracy, this individual resorted to making provocations against us. He could not abide our clear and consistent opposition to Holden’s strategy and so attempted to smear us with vile slander by distorting our position on “age of consent” laws. We exposed this as a thinly veiled ploy to whip up liberal hysteria in support of the very IAM leaders who were busy sinking the strike. We oppose all state interference into consensual sexual activity, but this question had nothing to do with the struggle at hand.

Some Mobilize! members—who were more susceptible to liberal pressure and shrank from doing anything to upset the bureaucracy—joined in the smear job; but others flatly rejected it. These latter Machinists fought to clarify the committee’s purpose and carried the debate: Mobilize! was going to fight to escalate in opposition to the union bureaucracy’s strategy. In contrast, the pro-bureaucracy clot drew its own organizational conclusions from this struggle. They split from Mobilize! and formed a committee associated with Labor Notes, an outfit that nurtures aspiring bureaucrats under the reform label.

Soon after the split, the union bureaucracy engineered the defeat of the strike at the insistence of Boeing and the Democrats. Despite our and Mobilize!’s best efforts, the burying of the strike has caused demoralization in the ranks. However, there remains a path forward: fight for a new, class-struggle leadership to arm Machinists and other unions for the battles on the horizon.