After rejecting a tentative agreement that was strongly backed by the union leadership on Thursday, more than 33,000 Boeing workers are fired up and ready to take this strike into their own hands. They deserve the support of the entire working class.
James Dennis Hoff
September 13, 2024
LEFT VOICE
A Bad Deal Pushed by Bureaucrats
The rejected agreement had included a $3,000 signing bonus, raises of up to 25 percent over the life of the proposed four year contract — including an 11 percent raise in year one — and a commitment to build any new planes at the Seattle area plant. While on the surface this may seem like a good deal, the economic offer would not have made up for what workers have lost to inflation since 2020, and was nowhere near the 40 percent wage increases that the union membership has been demanding. Even worse, the proposed contract would have done away with annual bonuses for workers, making the actual economic offer much smaller than the purported 25 percent the union was selling. Furthermore, the promise to manufacture any new planes in Seattle would only apply for the four years of the contract, after which the company would be under no obligations not to move manufacturing elsewhere in order to punish the union. This threat to leave the Seattle area is a tactic the company has long used to keep workers on the defensive. Equally important, the agreement also offered no advances toward the restoration of traditional pensions, something that workers have all along said they are willing and ready to strike for. As Seattle shop steward John Voss told Labor Notes: “That is a hill we are willing to die on.” It also did little to address the problem of forced overtime, which has left workers exhausted, contributing to an unsafe work environment for everyone. In fact, as the Seattle Times reported last week, Boeing has been using overtime to unsafely ramp up production in anticipation of a possible strike, pushing partially-built planes through the assembly line in order to have them completed by scabs at a later date if needed. Such moves show the ways in which it is company greed and not worker mistakes that have led to the recent string of dangerous problems with Boeing aircraft.
Despite this, the union leadership, including IAM president Brian Bryant, repeatedly argued that this was a good contract and the best that the union could possibly win with or without a strike, and had urged their members to vote “yes” on the agreement. But the leadership did more than merely campaign for the agreement, they have a rigged system of voting in order to make it as difficult as possible to reject proposed contracts. Even though the union had already taken a strike authorization vote in July, the members still had to take two separate votes on Thursday: one on the contract, and the other on whether or not to go on strike. According to the rules of the vote, the proposed contract would only be rejected if a majority of members voted no on the tentative agreement and if two thirds then voted for a strike. Otherwise the agreement would be automatically ratified. This ploy was meant to ensure that the TA would pass, and yet the rank-and-file resoundingly said no. This was also the first time that an IAM president had ever weighed in on a tentative agreement vote, and reveals the degree to which the leadership, despite the recent successes of other manufacturing unions like the UAW, is beholden to the boss and scared of this strike.
But it is clear that these workers are willing and ready to fight for more. When IAM posted the announcement of the agreement on their social media they received so many negative comments that they had to delete their Facebook post and turn off comments on their X post. On the day before the vote, thousands of rank-and-file union members organized independently of the leadership to march outside of the Everett, Washington plant to demand a strike, and workers inside the Renton plant had reportedly slowed down production, protesting for five minutes every hour on the hour. Such self-organization is essential to mobilize the rank-and-file and continue the strike until victory, not just until the union bureaucracy has decided it’s time to settle. These types of actions also present the opportunity to invite support from wider sectors of the community and beyond to fuel the strike.
It has added significance, however, as a strike of Boeing workers threatens the profits of not just the company, but other sectors of the U.S. economy as well. As we saw with the cancelled railroad strike in 2022, the bourgeois state will intervene if necessary to protect capitalist profits at the expense of workers. Union leaderships often fall in line. Self-organization of the rank and file is a first step toward breaking not only with the union bureaucracy, but with the state and the bourgeois parties that seek to limit the power of working people in the service of capital.
Plenty of Money to Go Around
Despite Boeing’s recent troubles, and despite their claims that the TA is the best they can offer, it is obvious that the company has plenty of money to meet all of these workers’ demands and then some. Although Boeing profits have dropped somewhat in the last quarter, the company has more than doubled its gross profit since 2020, bringing in a staggering $7.7 billion in profits in 2023, compared to $3.5 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, as Boeing has been raking in profits, the workers who make the planes have not received a raise in over ten years, and have lost more than 21 percent of their wages to inflation since 2020. To make matters worse, many of these workers, particularly those at the Seattle plant, live in areas with some of the highest housing costs in the country. In Seattle, for instance, which has had a housing crisis for decades, the median cost for a house is over $800,000 and the average rent for a small two bedroom apartment is more than $2,700 a month.
Because of this these employees are forced to take massive amounts of overtime, sometimes working as many as 19 days in a row in order to earn enough to get by. Like so many other large manufacturing companies, Boeing also regularly requires mandatory overtime, often several weekends in a row, something that workers say they want changed in the next contract and didn’t feel the TA went far enough in addressing.
Self-Organization and Worker Solidarity
It is clear that the leadership of the IAM is neither prepared nor willing to take the measures necessary to win this strike and actually build the power of the union and the larger working class of which they are a part. As the struggle for a new contract begins, it is imperative that IAM members continue to reject the misleadership of the union bureaucrats that tried to sell them a terrible contract and take the organization of the strike into their own hands. This means creating independent rank-and-file committees to coordinate the actions of the strike and, most importantly, regular assemblies of workers, their families, and their communities to discuss, debate, and decide on the way forward. Self-organization of this kind will be crucial to winning the best possible deal from the strike. Boeing workers are a central and strategically positioned part of the wider working class in the Seattle area, and this strike is as important for the rest of the class as it is for them. This is also why it is so important for other unions and non-unionized workers to turn out and to stand in solidarity with Boeing workers not only to win a better contract for them, but to build the wider power of the working class as whole. It was only a little more than 100 years ago, in 1919, that workers across Seattle led a massive general strike in support of dock workers who had been locked out of their jobs. That action brought the city to its knees and galvanized the entire working class, which for a short period had completely taken over city services to ensure the welfare of working people; this became what some have called the Seattle Soviet. While we are far from such a situation now, the history of the region where Boeing workers have just walked off the job shows the immense power and creativity of the working class when it takes the fight into its own hands.
James Dennis Hoff
James Dennis Hoff is a writer, educator, labor activist, and member of the Left Voice editorial board. He teaches at The City University of New York.
LEFT VOICE
Photo: Stephen Brashear
On Thursday thousands of Boeing employees, members of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM), rejected a tentative agreement proposed by union leadership and voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. In what has to be one of the most united stands against a tentative agreement in recent history, 94.6 percent of IAM members voted “no” on the proposed deal, while an even larger number, 96 percent, voted in favor of a strike. The vote sends a clear message to Boeing and the IAM leadership that these workers expect more and are ready to fight and represents a significant defeat for the union leadership.
The strike, which includes more than 33,000 IAM members, is the largest so far in 2024, and is the first job action at a major aircraft manufacturing plant since Boeing machinists last walked out in 2008. That strike lasted 54 days and cost the company more than $5 billion.
On Thursday thousands of Boeing employees, members of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM), rejected a tentative agreement proposed by union leadership and voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. In what has to be one of the most united stands against a tentative agreement in recent history, 94.6 percent of IAM members voted “no” on the proposed deal, while an even larger number, 96 percent, voted in favor of a strike. The vote sends a clear message to Boeing and the IAM leadership that these workers expect more and are ready to fight and represents a significant defeat for the union leadership.
The strike, which includes more than 33,000 IAM members, is the largest so far in 2024, and is the first job action at a major aircraft manufacturing plant since Boeing machinists last walked out in 2008. That strike lasted 54 days and cost the company more than $5 billion.
A Bad Deal Pushed by Bureaucrats
The rejected agreement had included a $3,000 signing bonus, raises of up to 25 percent over the life of the proposed four year contract — including an 11 percent raise in year one — and a commitment to build any new planes at the Seattle area plant. While on the surface this may seem like a good deal, the economic offer would not have made up for what workers have lost to inflation since 2020, and was nowhere near the 40 percent wage increases that the union membership has been demanding. Even worse, the proposed contract would have done away with annual bonuses for workers, making the actual economic offer much smaller than the purported 25 percent the union was selling. Furthermore, the promise to manufacture any new planes in Seattle would only apply for the four years of the contract, after which the company would be under no obligations not to move manufacturing elsewhere in order to punish the union. This threat to leave the Seattle area is a tactic the company has long used to keep workers on the defensive. Equally important, the agreement also offered no advances toward the restoration of traditional pensions, something that workers have all along said they are willing and ready to strike for. As Seattle shop steward John Voss told Labor Notes: “That is a hill we are willing to die on.” It also did little to address the problem of forced overtime, which has left workers exhausted, contributing to an unsafe work environment for everyone. In fact, as the Seattle Times reported last week, Boeing has been using overtime to unsafely ramp up production in anticipation of a possible strike, pushing partially-built planes through the assembly line in order to have them completed by scabs at a later date if needed. Such moves show the ways in which it is company greed and not worker mistakes that have led to the recent string of dangerous problems with Boeing aircraft.
Despite this, the union leadership, including IAM president Brian Bryant, repeatedly argued that this was a good contract and the best that the union could possibly win with or without a strike, and had urged their members to vote “yes” on the agreement. But the leadership did more than merely campaign for the agreement, they have a rigged system of voting in order to make it as difficult as possible to reject proposed contracts. Even though the union had already taken a strike authorization vote in July, the members still had to take two separate votes on Thursday: one on the contract, and the other on whether or not to go on strike. According to the rules of the vote, the proposed contract would only be rejected if a majority of members voted no on the tentative agreement and if two thirds then voted for a strike. Otherwise the agreement would be automatically ratified. This ploy was meant to ensure that the TA would pass, and yet the rank-and-file resoundingly said no. This was also the first time that an IAM president had ever weighed in on a tentative agreement vote, and reveals the degree to which the leadership, despite the recent successes of other manufacturing unions like the UAW, is beholden to the boss and scared of this strike.
But it is clear that these workers are willing and ready to fight for more. When IAM posted the announcement of the agreement on their social media they received so many negative comments that they had to delete their Facebook post and turn off comments on their X post. On the day before the vote, thousands of rank-and-file union members organized independently of the leadership to march outside of the Everett, Washington plant to demand a strike, and workers inside the Renton plant had reportedly slowed down production, protesting for five minutes every hour on the hour. Such self-organization is essential to mobilize the rank-and-file and continue the strike until victory, not just until the union bureaucracy has decided it’s time to settle. These types of actions also present the opportunity to invite support from wider sectors of the community and beyond to fuel the strike.
It has added significance, however, as a strike of Boeing workers threatens the profits of not just the company, but other sectors of the U.S. economy as well. As we saw with the cancelled railroad strike in 2022, the bourgeois state will intervene if necessary to protect capitalist profits at the expense of workers. Union leaderships often fall in line. Self-organization of the rank and file is a first step toward breaking not only with the union bureaucracy, but with the state and the bourgeois parties that seek to limit the power of working people in the service of capital.
Plenty of Money to Go Around
Despite Boeing’s recent troubles, and despite their claims that the TA is the best they can offer, it is obvious that the company has plenty of money to meet all of these workers’ demands and then some. Although Boeing profits have dropped somewhat in the last quarter, the company has more than doubled its gross profit since 2020, bringing in a staggering $7.7 billion in profits in 2023, compared to $3.5 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, as Boeing has been raking in profits, the workers who make the planes have not received a raise in over ten years, and have lost more than 21 percent of their wages to inflation since 2020. To make matters worse, many of these workers, particularly those at the Seattle plant, live in areas with some of the highest housing costs in the country. In Seattle, for instance, which has had a housing crisis for decades, the median cost for a house is over $800,000 and the average rent for a small two bedroom apartment is more than $2,700 a month.
Because of this these employees are forced to take massive amounts of overtime, sometimes working as many as 19 days in a row in order to earn enough to get by. Like so many other large manufacturing companies, Boeing also regularly requires mandatory overtime, often several weekends in a row, something that workers say they want changed in the next contract and didn’t feel the TA went far enough in addressing.
Self-Organization and Worker Solidarity
It is clear that the leadership of the IAM is neither prepared nor willing to take the measures necessary to win this strike and actually build the power of the union and the larger working class of which they are a part. As the struggle for a new contract begins, it is imperative that IAM members continue to reject the misleadership of the union bureaucrats that tried to sell them a terrible contract and take the organization of the strike into their own hands. This means creating independent rank-and-file committees to coordinate the actions of the strike and, most importantly, regular assemblies of workers, their families, and their communities to discuss, debate, and decide on the way forward. Self-organization of this kind will be crucial to winning the best possible deal from the strike. Boeing workers are a central and strategically positioned part of the wider working class in the Seattle area, and this strike is as important for the rest of the class as it is for them. This is also why it is so important for other unions and non-unionized workers to turn out and to stand in solidarity with Boeing workers not only to win a better contract for them, but to build the wider power of the working class as whole. It was only a little more than 100 years ago, in 1919, that workers across Seattle led a massive general strike in support of dock workers who had been locked out of their jobs. That action brought the city to its knees and galvanized the entire working class, which for a short period had completely taken over city services to ensure the welfare of working people; this became what some have called the Seattle Soviet. While we are far from such a situation now, the history of the region where Boeing workers have just walked off the job shows the immense power and creativity of the working class when it takes the fight into its own hands.
James Dennis Hoff
James Dennis Hoff is a writer, educator, labor activist, and member of the Left Voice editorial board. He teaches at The City University of New York.
