Save All Working People from Boeing!

The strike’s outcome is all the more maddening because the IAM’s position was initially so strong. Boeing production jobs are not what they used to be—and neither is the country in general. The U.S.-dominated world order is cracking, and the widely hated Biden/Harris administration rains down economic ruin. The wreck that Boeing has made of its production process and the squeezing of its workforce—and the disasters that have followed—reflect all-sided capitalist decay. Workers across the country have grown increasingly combative and anxious about the future.

Against this backdrop, the Boeing Machinist strike had the potential to spark a wider working-class fight back both locally and nationally—if the union had fought to draw its working-class supporters into a struggle to impose their will on Boeing. In this event, the strike would have been a beacon to the working class as a whole, opened the door to union control of safety and quality and made it possible to win demands like the restoration of the pension and the elimination of the wage progression by ensuring top pay for all.

These demands, if won by the Machinists, would set the stage for other workers to win the same—which explains in part why Boeing was not going to cave on pensions unless it was forced to do so through a serious confrontation. The Machinists had no shortage of allies they could have mobilized in solidarity action: Boeing engineers, firefighters and truck drivers, unions that handle Boeing parts like the ILWU longshoremen and Teamsters, other unions that have taken on their bosses recently like IBEW Local 46 electricians and UNITE HERE Local 8 hotel workers, to name a few.

Individual workers from these unions and more turned out to the picket lines. But even while workers have displayed a willingness to fight for relief from staggering prices and job and retirement insecurity, union leaders do everything to restrain those impulses and keep them within the bounds considered safe by the bosses. Holden sought to make the IAM “full partners” with the crooks who run Boeing and to secure a “fair share” for workers in that context. The strike hit the limit of what the bosses were willing to concede without their grip on industry or society at large being challenged. A strategy different from the union bureaucracy’s is needed, one based not on the usual “give and take” at the bargaining table but rather on provoking a clash between the counterposed interests of the workers and the bosses.

The union can strengthen its hand right now by laying claim to independent enforcement of safety and quality on the job—and acting to shut down assembly on the spot if need be. Boeing has thrown safety and quality out the window in the pursuit of profit, and the flying public has paid for it in blood. The federal government is around to cover up as much as possible to help the company get out from under the dark clouds. Reliance on joint labor-management safety teams or government agencies like the FAA will not save working people from Boeing. To accomplish that, the union must make inroads against the company’s perceived “right” to have the final say in all aspects of assembly.