How to Win This One

AUGUST 19—The fighting Machinists are back on the picket lines. Only now, the battle has shifted from Puget Sound to the St. Louis area, where IAM District 837 members at Boeing Air Dominance make fighter jets and weapons systems for the U.S. military. In the lead-up to the strike, union members said “hell no” to not one, but two BS offers that their leadership tried to pass off on them. For over two weeks, they have been on strike, demanding better compensation, job security and a little respect. But this class contest is not headed in the right direction: The company is playing chess while IAM leaders play checkers. This must change—the ranks want to play to win, and all the union’s moves must reflect that.

Boeing is running a scab operation, rather than simply waging a war of attrition, like it did for most of the recent District 751 strike in Seattle. If District 837 is going to come out of this conflict on top, the union ranks are going to have to draw their own lessons from that earlier battle and escalate now. Last fall, the 33,000-strong District 751 membership held the line against Boeing for nearly two months. But their leaders did everything to demobilize the strike, because a strong strike would have caused fits for the Democrats who they wanted to help stay in power. Picket lines were kept small and porous, no effort was made to reach out to other Boeing unions or area workers to honor the lines, talk of “one day longer, one day stronger” demoralized strikers when it clearly wasn’t true. The moment Boeing said “enough,” the union leadership rolled over and embraced a rotten deal that fell far short of what could have been won—and now the company is back to lording it over the Machinists.

Today, the District 837 leadership, which also never wanted a strike, is following the exact same losing playbook as their Seattle cohorts—right down to peddling the “one day longer” nonsense. A union is stronger when it is united and enforces its picket lines. If anything, sticking to the Seattle playbook will have even more disastrous results in St. Louis. After all, a much smaller fraction of Machinists is currently on strike, and workers across the country are under the gun, from the shredding of federal union contracts to the ICE workplace raids. Victory is not out of grasp, but District 837 members have no time to waste. They must take steps immediately to build mass picket lines and stop the scabs, cut off parts deliveries and organize the unorganized, while working to break down the divisions that hold the union back.

Boeing is a past master at divide and conquer: pit new hires against more established workers, union workers against the unorganized, the legacy Boeing workforce against the legacy McDonnell Douglas. Machinists must counter this with a strategy capable of uniting workers across these divisions—including their class brothers and sisters in the aerospace and defense industries (as well as the broader St. Louis labor movement) in a common defensive front to beat back Boeing and other employers.

The picket line is a battle line in the class struggle—Machinists must fight to stop anything from going in or out of the plants. Boeing is forcing probationary employees to scab or lose their jobs—appeal to them to join the strike and the union as full members. District 751 members are pissed off at how their strike ended and are back to getting pounded by Boeing—appeal to them to lend a helping hand by downing their tools and sticking it to the company.

But the only appeal the IAM tops have made is to Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt to get Boeing back to the negotiating table. While this time the union leadership wants to work with Republicans instead of Democrats, its reliance on the bosses’ politicians is just as much of a dead end as before. The only way that workers will get what they want is if Boeing is forced back to the table, tail between its legs, after a projection of union strength.

For Union Dominance at Boeing

Many workers at Boeing and beyond voted for Trump in November out of expectation that he would provide some economic relief. But no relief has materialized. Since he took office, some scattered strikes have broken out—overwhelmingly in response to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. But union bureaucrats have isolated and limited these strikes so as not to cross Trump (or Democratic politicians) as he goes about remaking the U.S. economy in anticipation of increased military conflict ahead. A number of these strikes have occurred in the defense industry, where the outlook for the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney and Boeing is very rosy. But it is another story altogether for workers at these companies—they are falling ever more deeply into the hole and have to fight to dig themselves out. Good times for the defense industry amid a buildup toward war with China translates into nothing but harder times for defense workers—and only some serious struggle can change that.

Trump has been practicing his “Art of the Deal” on the world stage. Who is making out like bandits? Only Boeing, not the Machinists. The company, thanks to the F-47 and other contracts, now sits on a massive war chest that it can use to crush the strike. Machinists, though, have to fight just to defend themselves. F-47 jobs under worse conditions provide no future for Boeing or any other workers. Leaning on Trump or the Democrats is not going to help matters. The only perspective that will make a difference is to look to establish union dominance at Boeing.

The quality and safety problems long plaguing Boeing’s commercial operations have also cropped up in its military production. This management-created chaos in the build process mirrors the chaos this country’s rulers create abroad. And that chaos abroad always comes back to hurt workers here—in the form of increased regimentation, higher prices for basic goods, less tolerance for their struggles and greater sacrifice of their and their children’s lives in military adventures, to name a few. Trump selling jets and munitions to Israel to bomb babies in Gaza no more benefits the Machinists than when Biden was doing the same. A strong union would assert control over safety and quality enforcement as well as where the material Machinists manufacture goes and what it is used for.

District 837 Machinists would do well to learn from the efforts of IAM 751 Mobilize!, a group of rank-and-file Machinists who came together to fight for a strong strike in opposition to the union bureaucracy. Mobilize! militants showed the way by turning the sole strike rally called by union leaders (as a talk shop for Democratic politicians) into a real display of force. They led hundreds to the picket lines, organized against the company’s lousy offers and called to escalate the strike in various ways.

Despite their best efforts, they could not turn the strike around. But they knew that the only way forward was to take strike leadership out of the hands of the do-nothing bureaucrats and put it in their own. The same goes today in St. Louis. District 837 Machinists must organize a strike committee to set their strike on a new course: Mobilize labor’s strength—bring the probationary workers in, build picket lines nobody dares cross! Fight for union dominance at Boeing and across the defense industry!