As the Socialist Equality Party’s vice-presidential candidate, I denounce the moves by the Biden White House and its Wall Street backers to break the courageous month-long strike by 33,000 Boeing workers.
SEP vice presidential candidate Jerry White (second from right) with striking Boeing workers
Last Friday, Boeing announced 17,000 layoffs, in an act of vengeance against the strike. On Monday, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su was sent to Seattle to procure a sellout contract from the International Association of Machinists (IAM) bureaucracy to shut the strike down.
Workers’ demands are entirely justified. They want 40 percent pay increases to make up for high inflation and record housing prices, the restoration of pensions stolen from them a decade ago, and massive improvements to quality and safety standards, which have been slashed for years by corporate executives.
In intervening to shut down the strike, the Biden administration is defending corporate criminals implicated in the deaths of hundreds of people. Years of relentless, profit-driven cost-cutting have led to massive safety issues on the company’s 737 MAX aircraft, including two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. On top of this, the suspicious deaths of two Boeing whistleblowers has yet to be adequately explained. These are lives which were sacrificed to profit.
But the deaths due to unsafe aircraft pale in comparison to the deaths caused by US imperialism with the aid of Boeing missiles and combat aircraft. The bombs that Israel, the United States’ attack dog in the Middle East, are raining down on the defenseless population of Gaza are being made in the USA and shipped by the White House to Israel as fast as they can be made.
The corporate-financial oligarchy claims that society cannot afford to give workers decent wages and a secure retirement. The fact is, society cannot afford the rich. Labor’s share of the national income has fallen to the lowest levels on record by far, according to Federal Reserve data, while trillions of dollars are squandered on Wall Street and billionaire wealth. Meanwhile, US imperialism has brought humanity to the brink of a Third World War.
The levels of inequality in this country have also brought democracy to its death bed. The most explicit form of this is Trump, who incites violence against immigrants and wants to build a fascist movement to crush the “enemy within,” by which he means the working class.
But the other capitalist party, the Democrats, are no alternative. Fixated completely on war, they join hands with Republicans in attacking anti-war protests. Meanwhile, they also attack the democratic rights of the working class, including the right to strike, as shown in Biden’s strike ban against railroaders in 2022.
Pseudo-left groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, which function as a faction of the Democrats, try to cover for its right-wing record through empty populist phrases. Last week, many such figures in Congress penned an open letter encouraging an “equitable settlement” to the strike. But many of these figures, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted two years ago to ban the rail strike. The same goes for Progressive Caucus Leader Representative Pramila Jayapal and US Senator Maria Cantell, whom the IAM leaders are parading before workers at the October 15 strike rally. That they are all intervening in the Boeing strike is another sign that the White House is moving to shut it down.
I urge all workers, across the United States and around the world, to rally to the defense of the Boeing strike. The entire working class has a stake in this strike because it is not just a fight against Boeing executives, but against the entire capitalist profit system, which subordinates all decision-making to profit.
The unaccountable power of Boeing and the other major corporations must be shattered, and their assets placed at the disposal of human need, not Wall Street. I call on workers to fight for the transformation of Boeing and other basic industries into public utilities, democratically run by workers themselves.
This must be built and organized in opposition to the union bureaucracy through the construction of rank-and-file committees across the world. The Biden administration is using the services of the bureaucracy to suppress working class opposition and try to drum up support for war, summed up in Biden’s declaration that the AFL-CIO is his “domestic NATO.”
But the Boeing strike, which was forced by workers through a rebellion against a sellout contract backed by the IAM apparatus, is the latest in a series of struggles which have brought workers into conflict with the sellout bureaucrats. The most conscious expression of this opposition is the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee, formed in the opening days of the strike.
Others like it it have been built all over the world, from the railroads to autoworkers, logistics workers, teachers and others. United in the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), these committees form the scaffolding of a new movement based on the international unity of the working class.
In moving ruthlessly against workers, the actions of Boeing and the White House pose directly the question: which class will rule? The working class, which creates the world’s wealth and is opposed to inequality and war, or the capitalists, who live at the expense of society?
Above all, what the Boeing strike shows is the need for a new political program, socialism, to guide workers in their struggles. Workers must prepare themselves for a fight against the profit system itself, which offers humanity only a future of war and dictatorship. In its place workers must fight for a workers’ government which will dismantle inequality, class divisions and national conflict.
We cannot run an election campaign without the support of workers and youth like you who want to fight for socialism.
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