33,000 Boeing workers in the Seattle area, with machinist’s union IAM, are now in their fifth week of striking for higher wages, reinstatement of their pensions, and protections against forced overtime. This strike is a massive industrial shutdown by workers against the bosses and executives. 

Even up against Boeing’s huge financial and political resources, the workers have proven that, without them, not a single part gets put on a single airplane. Production is at a complete standstill. Staying strong for pensions and 40% raises would be a huge victory not just for the IAM, but any worker who wants the ability to have a stable retirement.

Boeing and their subcontractors are losing large sums of money (Boeing alone has lost more than $3.7 billion already), and those costs will snowball the longer the strike goes on. But there are still other immense pressures on Boeing to end the strike. The National Association of Manufacturers, a group of 14,000 manufacturing companies of which Boeing is a member, are leaning on politicians to get this resolved, especially before the November election. 

At the same time, Boeing faces public pressure after their chronic corporate negligence of passenger and worker safety and society’s growing outrage at corporate greed more generally. Boeing’s ravenous cash grabs and how they have led to the litany of failures for workers and passengers alike are well-documented and have been the subject of widespread public scandal. 

Boeing’s corporate practices and their dangerous effect on passenger safety put a lot of working people on the side of striking IAM workers, who recognize that conditions for them at work impact passenger safety. Unsafe working conditions at Boeing create unsafe airplanes.

As of this writing, Boeing hasn’t bettered its most recent non-negotiated offer of a 30% raise, and has instead retracted that offer, trying to play hard ball. “They refused to propose any wage increases, vacation/sick leave accrual, progression, ratification bonus, or the 401k Match/SCRC Contribution. They also would not reinstate the defined benefit pension,” IAM said in their daily strike update. The workers already made it clear with union polls that 80% of them weren’t letting the top executives off that easily.

Boeing, and its owners BlackRock and Vanguard, is willing to lose billions more in the short term, because they are afraid of letting the IAM score a lasting victory. It will take a real escalation to win a 40% raise and pensions. 

What Would A Strong Contract Look Like?

In this era of record worker productivity and record corporate profits alongside record wealth and income inequality that some call “the new Gilded Age”, the highly-specialized factory workers at Boeing can play a leading role in winning back pensions. This could begin a shifting back in the balance of power away from the billionaires and toward people who work for a living. 

Every worker deserves a pension, which offers security no matter what happens in the future to the stock market or the company. More and more defined benefit pensions have been replaced with unreliable 401ks or with no retirement plan at all. Boeing workers have a huge opportunity to turn the tide for all workers by winning pensions back for themselves. 

Boeing is dishonestly claiming they cannot afford the demands of the workers despite a $33 million golden parachute to Boeing’s former CEO five months ago, their more than $14 billion in profits over the past three years, $68 billion in stock buybacks since 2010, and their wealth of stocks and securities they can sell. Labor costs for Boeing are less than 5% of expenditures. 

Boeing holds a monopoly over the US aerospace industry, is the third largest US defense contractor, and is the largest exporter in the US, but no revenue will come from these factories so long as the workers say so. Every Boeing worker is in a great position to vote “no” on any contract that doesn’t offer at least a 40% general wage increase and the reinstatement of Defined Benefits Pensions.

At the picket lines, we’ve heard several times that workers feel that either they were given inadequate on-the-job training or that they were put upon to train new workers when they had their own work to do and weren’t paid extra. When the safety of both workers and passengers is on the line, proper training and protocols, as well as workers being able to confidently stop the line when something might be unsafe, are of paramount importance. 

A recent Federal Aviation Administration audit of Boeing confirmed that “workers felt pressured to prioritize speed over safety” and that workers didn’t receive enough training to properly perform their jobs. The best possible contract for Boeing workers would give the workers, as a union, the collective power over all training and safety protocols.

What Strategy Is Needed To Win?

Socialist Alternative members have been out on the picket lines since the strike was called and have had dozens of conversations with workers about the conditions in the workplace, their frustrations and anger with the Boeing executives, what demands are most important to them, and what it will take to win. Most workers seem to be ready for the long haul. 

However for many workers, especially those more recently hired, finances will be stretched very thin on the $250 a week strike pay. Local support from the public is very high in the Puget Sound area, with non-stop honks from cars passing by the picket lines. There have been important displays of solidarity for IAM’s strike from a number of other unions, but the wider labor movement should step in fully and help fund this strike with solidarity donations of millions of dollars as well as member mobilization to strengthen the picket lines. 

It’s clear from many conversations that reinstated pensions matter to workers and that many recognize the leverage they hold. All the same, it was not uncommon to hear that workers would vote “yes” on a deal with the 40% general wage increase without pensions and overtime protections, simply because many don’t believe enough others will hold strong. 

We believe that not only should every worker hold out for everything they believe they deserve and more, but also that workers have a duty to do everything they can to convince their coworkers of the same. The union is strong when it is unified around genuinely meaningful demands that workers care about and would improve conditions, not around the easiest demands to win.

“One day longer, one day stronger” is the rallying cry from the union, repeated in many of the daily strike updates from IAM local leaders and echoed on the picket lines. The willingness to fight for “as long as it takes” is courageous and is undoubtedly necessary. History has shown us, however, that any power the workers have by refusing to work is amplified many times over with strong picket lines, active community and labor support, and regular input from the rank-and-file about what is needed to win. 

Concretely, this could begin by the union officially holding weekly all-member strike meetings for rank and file members to get updates, ask questions, and most importantly, discuss strike strategy and the best way forward. The most successful labor actions have had wide worker participation and rank-and-file democratic decision making. 

Boeing is digging in with an Unfair Labor Practice charge, withdrawing its weak contract offer, and laying off 17,000 workers. The union needs to hit back. Boeing’s weak spot is their non-unionized commercial plant in South Carolina. The IAM should use its vast resources, including possibly hundreds of local IAM workers and staffers, to mount a challenge to unionize that plant and open a second front in this battle.

If Boeing continues to block progress toward a contract, the King County Labor Council needs to consider a one-day strike in solidarity. The IAM at Boeing is a critical component of the local labor movement, and all of labor cannot afford a defeat at Boeing.

Rebuilding Militant Labor Traditions

The power to shut down production, profits, and sometimes part or all of society, is what defines the power of the working class. While Boeing machinists’ picket lines are not blocking entry to the buildings, their work is so vital that the other workers going in (engineers, white collar workers, and management) are not able to do much. That means IAM is totally shutting down Boeing’s production. 

Workers who have been at Boeing for years will often reflect on how, in 2014, the union leaders took to undemocratic maneuvering to push through a bad “contract renewal” that timidly relinquished the Defined Pension Plan. Raised wages are vitally important for workers to catch up with the precipitous rise in the cost of living, but it is the pension that can give workers and their families long-term peace of mind and stability. 

Workers voted that deal down in 2014 but the leaders held another vote the day after a holiday started when the significant majority of workers weren’t able to attend, and it was passed. While the moment is different today, and the leadership has stood strong against the company’s attempts to intimidate, leaders will be under even more pressure to bring the workers a deal Boeing executives find acceptable. 

A union is not an entity that provides workers with a service that they can simply rely on to take care of things. The union is all the workers that make it up, and each one has a role to play in defending and extending their compensation, workplace conditions, and rights. It’s on the strike lines that workers can try to sharpen their ideas, learn lessons from one another, debate the right demands and strike tactics, encourage one another to raise expectations, and to plan next steps for the strike, beyond “one day longer”. 

It will ultimately be on rank-and-file workers to defend against a bad contract by, first, refusing to go back to work until a tentative agreement can be reviewed and voted on by the workers, and second by voting “no” on any deal that doesn’t include at least 40% and pensions. 

Teachers all across West Virginia in 2018 defied their leadership and laws against public sector strikes to walk out for better raises and lower healthcare costs, and even refused to go back to work when the union leaders reached a new deal and called for a cooling off period. Instead the teachers stayed out on strike over another week when more of their demands were met and they were able to vote on the contract. That kind of struggle and fire had to come from rank and file teachers, not their elected union leaders. 

Powerful industrial strikes like this one are touchstone moments for the labor movement which can be used to reverse decades of retreats, from which billionaires and corporations made record profits while most labor leaders refused to fight.

Will The Democrats Help Workers Win?

The union’s leadership, along with the great majority of labor leaders, who have spent decades becoming far too amenable to the interests of the corporations and their institutions, have endorsed Kamala Harris and donate the vast bulk of their political money toward defending incumbent Democratic Party candidates.

The Democratic Party wants to resolve this strike before the election, and don’t want to give Trump the opportunity to appear to “fix” it. There will be political pressure on the union leadership from the Biden administration and Harris campaign to give concessions to the company in order to end the strike before Election Day gets much closer, especially with an incredibly tight race in key swing states. 

While their rhetoric suggests Biden is the most pro-labor president in history and has passed important pro-worker legislation, positive changes have been relegated to minor and temporary fixes, such as appointing a better Labor Relations Board than Trump (a bar too low to measure), while his administration and party’s attacks on labor have been swift and fierce. 

The Democrats and Biden fully supported and legislated the breaking of the rail workers’ strike. Workers in that strike were desperate for safer work conditions and more paid time off for a difficult job that offers extremely little. Biden’s Labor Secretary Julie Su has also been instrumental in negotiating weak deals that union leaders have sold to members as great deals. 

This also happened last year with UPS Teamsters, including myself as I was a driver at UPS during that period. Many of my former UPS co-workers are now regretting their contract, which could have been far stronger if we had chosen to strike. West coast dock workers also could have won far more with a shut down. It’s long past time that the labor movement, including IAM, breaks from the corporate two party dead-end. 

Boeing On The Ropes – Time To Escalate

A successful strike needs to escalate using tactics like packing picket lines, holding rallies, and organizing marches and community support. It also needs to expand however possible. What would expansion of the Boeing strike look like? The company has long held the threat of moving jobs to South Carolina where all other commercial production for Boeing happens with non-union workers. 

When this new contract is won, Boeing will be inclined to use that as an excuse to move jobs, as capitalism always seeks the cheapest source of labor, no matter the human cost. Sending a force of IAM workers and staffers to South Carolina to help organize that plant into the union would help protect against either plant losing jobs, and it would greatly strengthen both their bargaining power and drastically improve the lives of those currently non-union workers. 

With Boeing on the ropes, now is the time for the union to hit hard. 

While the South has been historically difficult to organize, the recent success of workers in Chattanooga, TN voting overwhelmingly to join the UAW, following their major victory over the Big Three automakers, proves that breakthroughs are possible across the country with a strong labor movement. The UAW’s strategy of taking their 2023 strike momentum and victory into the south was a huge shift for labor in the right direction. 

It is up to rank and file Boeing workers to push for escalated tactics and expanding the strike to win against Boeing and secure victories that will be crucial to the labor movement and fight against corporate greed. Part and parcel to that strategy should be IAM sending a force to Boeing South Carolina and putting real resources into helping those workers form their own union to join with the Seattle area machinists.  

Boeing Machinists Unite & Fight!

• Hold out for 40% and reinstated pensions!
• Union control of training and safety protocols – Safety for workers and passengers!
• No return to work until TA is approved by in-person member vote!
• Up the pressure on Boeing – fight to unionize the South Carolina plant.
• IAM leadership should hold in-person, weekly update meetings for the membership to discuss widening the strike.
• An injury to one is an injury to all, stand with all Boeing workers against layoffs. We cannot allow corporate greed to defeat us.
• For a stronger IAM, all union leaders should be on the average workers’ wage.