EDITORIAL

Sep 23, 2024

Workers Need to Control the Economy

Thirty-two thousand workers walked out of Boeing plants in Washington and Oregon. It was the biggest strike since last fall’s auto strike. But it is not the only important strike. 17,000 workers at AT&T had already been on strike for a month in nine southeastern states, with 8,500 workers set to join them in Nevada and California. Hotel workers in Boston carried out several waves of 3-day “rolling strikes,” focused on Labor Day. Workers at the Marathon refinery in Detroit went out, and they were soon followed by workers at Eaton Aerospace in Jackson, Michigan. Flight attendants were threatening to strike at American Airlines, as were port workers in East and Gulf Coast ports.

Working for different companies, in different industries, organized in different unions, going out separately, they nonetheless shared common grievances.

Right up front was the steady decrease in their standard of living, wages falling further behind inflation for years now. Boeing workers had been living under a contract last fully negotiated in 2008, with “wage re-openers” in 2011 and 2014, which barely moved the needle. American workers suffered under frozen wages for the last five years.

Even when workers gained minimal and inadequate wage increases—as they did in last year’s new auto contract—they were paid for by hidden cuts in pensions and medical care and, above all, by a mortal increase in the mad pace of work and worsening of other working conditions.

Many AT&T linemen had no set hours of work, starting at 8 a.m., often not going home until after 8 p.m., sometimes later than that—working until “the deck is cleared.” At Marathon, most workers had been dumped into an “alternating” schedule, working four 12-hour shifts, first on days, then on nights, reversing with each new turn—a killing schedule for human beings.

But the problems faced by workers at Boeing and Marathon and AT&T are not unusual. The big guns of the capitalist class have been carrying out a brutal offensive against the whole working class, for decades now.

Driving all these attacks is the capitalists’ ferocious push for greater profit. Wealth has rapidly accumulated at the top of the social ladder, paid for by the worsening of workers’ living and working conditions. Every company distributed a greater share of the wealth workers create to the parasites who own the companies—even companies like Boeing, which claim to have losses.

So, yes, it’s important that more workers are ready to strike. Wages have fallen so far behind, the intensity of work has reached deadly levels precisely because the working class has carried out so few fights for decades. The current strike at Boeing is the first since 2008, the one at Marathon is the first since 1994. If port workers go out, it will be the first East Coast strike since 1977—half a century ago!

But strikes at one company, even at multiple companies at the same time, cannot have the power needed to throw back the social war being carried out by the capitalist class against all the laboring people.

Workers are hamstrung by an organization of “labor relations” that leaves each group of workers to fight alone, that settles disputes one place at time, which even in many cases—as at Boeing today, or auto yesterday—leaves one class of workers on the job, even as others go out.

The capitalist class does not fight alone, in isolated fashion. It is waging a social war today as a united class, a war against the whole working class. It will not be slowed down, much less stopped, until there is a massive struggle by large parts of the working class, which aims not just to threaten the capitalist class, but to take away its control over the economy.

The working class needs to organize itself as the single, powerful class it can be. Such a fight will not succeed at a few workplaces alone, but it can start at some of those workplaces—IF there are militants in place, IF their primary aim is to spread the fight as widely as possible, IF their goal is to see the working class break free of the shackles created by the unions today, IF they push for the working class to organize itself politically, to take over control of the economy it already makes run.