The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Boeing Workers Say NO!

Oct 28, 2024

On October 23, 33,000 Boeing workers belonging to the IAM (International Association of Machinists) voted down another proposal offered by the company, deciding therefore to continue their strike.

The strike had begun September 13 when Boeing workers voted down a contract that had a 25% pay increase over 4 years. After a month, hit by the strike, the company increased its offer to 35%. But workers once again said NO!

In other words, despite the difficulty of being without a paycheck for four weeks, despite Boeing’s threats to lay off 10,000 workers, they refused to give up their fight.

Like other workers facing contracts this year, Boeing workers can see the latest offer doesn’t nearly catch them up to what they have lost. In the ten years since the last contract, the cost of living in the area around Seattle, Washington, where most Boeing workers live, has gone up by 40%. Housing costs have gone up by 100%. And new Boeing workers start with a pay rate that is barely more than the minimum wage for the Seattle area.

But it’s worse. Boeing workers remember that the pensions they lost in 2014—which were frozen for existing workers and eliminated for new hires—have never been restored.

What especially grinds is that in the ten years since workers let themselves be bludgeoned into giving up their pensions, Boeing has made huge profits. Those profits were handed over to wealthy stockholders, through 31 billion dollars in dividends and another 43 billion dollars in stock buybacks.

So, this time, Boeing workers decided to fight for what they need—and not accept what the wealthy owners of Boeing want.

To make that fight, they will be going up against more than just their own bosses. Several big banks and financial institutions have already given Boeing 20 billion dollars in lines of credit, helping the company to outlast the striking workers.

What the Boeing workers are facing is what almost every group of workers face today when they decide to strike. Workers find themselves not only going up against their own boss, but also against the whole capitalist class, who are linked financially and are united in their desire to increase their profits by taking more from the workers’ hide.

In a fight against their workers, every capitalist stands with other parts of their class, supported by the media they control and the state apparatus that serves them.

Maybe that creates obstacles for workers who want to fight. But Boeing workers can have all sorts of prospects. They are part of a class that potentially has power, when it pulls itself together to use it. What the workers make run, they can make stop—and reorganize to suit their own needs.

In the Seattle area, Boeing workers are linked with other parts of the working class, through their families, their neighbors, their churches, their social clubs, their sandlot sports teams, their unions. There is no reason to fight the bosses separately—one industry, or one company, and one union at a time.

Boeing workers, with all their links to other parts of their class, could set a real social struggle in motion, one going past just their own plants. That doesn’t depend on the union apparatus, it depends on whether there are militants, good union militants and others, who understand the need to spread their fight to other workers. If those people exist, the fight that has broken out at Boeing can end up being a fight that envelopes not only Boeing, not only Seattle, not only the aerospace industry, but other parts of the working class which confront the same problems, and have the same desire to impose their demands on a greedy capitalist class.