SEATTLE, October 24 - Today 33,000 Boeing Machinists voted to continue their 40-day old strike with 64 percent voting NO to a proposed settlement (and $7,000 signing bonus) negotiated by the Biden/Harris administration’s Labor Secretary, Julie Su. The workers, who build passenger jets and freighters, began their strike on September 12 after 96 percent voted to reject the tentative agreement between the company and the union. Boeing cut off strikers’ health care at the end of September.
The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) supports these workers in their strike against one of the most historically profitable companies on the planet and a critical node for the imperialist war machine. We invite all workers and supporters on the Boeing picket to join the fight to advance communist revolution as the way to crush all the exploiting bosses and their genocidal profit system.
Boeing bosses rakes in billions by killing workers
Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace corporation and fourth-largest defense contractor, valued at over $100 billion. Boeing makes the navigation system that guides the 2,000-lb. bomb that assassinated Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and many others in the middle of a crowded Beirut neighborhood. In partnership with Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas, Boeing has provided F-15 fighter jets, “Apache” helicopters, and hellfire missiles. Over the past 75 years, it’s safe to say that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Boeing’s weaponry (CounterPunch, 5/24).
But that’s not why Boeing workers are on strike. Workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, restoration of their pensions, and an end to forced overtime. Starting pay is $20 an hour, just above the area’s minimum wage, and it takes six years to reach top pay in your classification. There has been a high turnover since the pandemic, with about 40 percent of workers with less than five years seniority.
So far, the strike has cost Boeing a staggering $6 billion for the quarter and Boeing announced layoffs of managers and canceled parts orders to conserve cash. On October 11, Boeing announced it would eliminate 17,000 jobs in its worldwide work force.
The company has benefitted from the largest tax break in the state’s history, a decade of concessions on wages, pensions, and healthcare costs, and more than $6 billion in stock buybacks for shareholders and company executives. This underinvestment in the workforce and product development led to two deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 350 people and a door panel flying off in midflight this year.
Build a worker-student alliance
The campus-based movement against the growing Middle East war has raised antiracism and anti-imperialism but has lacked the power to significantly impact the war. Striking workers on the other hand, are at all the pressure points and have the power to bring this war, and this whole imperialist system to end, but they lack the political consciousness.
Our most urgent task is to build a communist-led worker-student alliance, to bring political consciousness to bear on the class struggle. The objective meeting the subjective. Striking workers are opening the door to this possibility. Discuss the strike at work and in class. Confront Boeing recruiters on campus. Build the movement for a worker-run society through communist revolution!
PLP’s history of fighting back war maker, strikebreaker General Electric
During the Vietnam War, General Electric (GE) was a major war profiteer and tens of thousands of GE workers went on strike. The PLP-led Worker-Student Alliance of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized strike support around the slogan, "Warmaker, Strikebreaker, Smash GE!" At a major anti-war mobilization in Washington, DC., SDS led a breakaway march of thousands to the Department of Labor in support of the striking workers. Lyndon Johnson pleaded with the workers to return to work because they were hurting the war effort. At a GE plant in Schenectady, NY, the workers chanted “F–k the war effort” on the picket lines.
