Support the Boeing workers rebellion! Mobilize the working class in defense of our rights!

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US vice president, I state my full solidarity with the strike by 33,000 Boeing workers which began Friday. Rank-and-file Boeing workers massively defeated a sellout contract which had been endorsed by the IAM union bureaucracy, rejecting it by 94.6 percent on Thursday.

Boeing workers have taken a vital step forward in voting down the contract and launching their first walkout since 2008. But in order for a real fight to be developed, workers have to organize themselves to take their struggle out of the hands of the pro-company IAM bureaucrats.

The fight at Boeing is part of a growing movement of the working class against an entire social system: capitalism. This is a system of exploitation in which the wealth produced by the collective labor of workers is monopolized by a handful of oligarchs who own everything. Workers must oppose the dictatorship of the ruling elites through the fight for workers power.

I call on workers throughout the US and internationally to mobilize behind the Boeing workers, as part of a broad counteroffensive against the corporate assault on workers’ living standards.

Boeing is a strategically vital US defense contractor and exporter. A stand here will embolden workers everywhere. Boeing workers must appeal to the working class across the United States and around the world, including 50,000 Washington state public workers who struck Tuesday, 45,000 dockworkers whose contract expires this month, striking oil refinery workers from Detroit, autoworkers and others.

Everywhere, the working class is fighting against the same thing: the erosion of their living standards by inflation and automation-driven layoffs. They are fighting for their social rights to a decent job, safe working conditions, ample time off to spend with their families, which the capitalists violate at every turn.

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The massive scandal at Boeing shows most nakedly that the capitalist ruling elite are social criminals. In the name of cutting costs and boosting share values, they have sabotaged basic safety measures, leading to accidents which have killed hundreds of people. Two whistleblowers who stepped forward have since died under mysterious circumstances.

The “contract” workers rejected was nothing more than an attempt to impose the cost of Boeing’s criminal actions onto the backs of workers. But Boeing workers are not responsible and have been fighting these dangerous practices for years.

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Workers are also fighting against a union bureaucracy which is totally in bed with management. The IAM contract is only the latest in a series of massive sellouts, including by the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the rail unions and many more.

The issue is not just corruption at the top—though there is certainly plenty of that—but the nature of the apparatus which controls the unions. Its social interests are opposed to the workers they claim to represent. They act as agents of management as well as of the corporate parties.

The Biden administration in particular is leaning on the trade union apparatus to limit strikes in key supply chains, impose sub-inflation wages and secure the “home front” for war.

This apparatus cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed and replaced with new bodies which workers genuinely control. This is why my campaign calls on workers at Boeing and in every industry to join the growing International Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. This new form of organization gives workers the power to override decisions which are taken in clear violation of the will of the membership, and enforce workers’ power in the workplace.

Workers must also be prepared to face off against the inevitable intervention by the president and Congress, whether it takes the form of an open strike injunction, like what occurred on the railroads two years ago, or so-called mediation—an injunction in all but name.

By organizing themselves independently of the apparatus and appealing for solidarity and joint actions with the working class as a whole, they will put themselves in the best position to defeat an intervention.

My running mate, Joseph Kishore, and I are running as the SEP’s candidates in this election to fight for a socialist program. The working class creates all of the wealth, but it is exploited and politically disfranchised.

The Democrats and Republicans represent different factions of the corporate and financial elite. Harris and Trump, who slugged it out in the gutters in this week’s debate, offer on the one hand war and genocide, and on the other, dictatorship and fascism.

Democracy is incompatible with capitalism. This is why the SEP calls for the transformation of Boeing and other major corporations into public utilities, run by the working class for the benefit of all. We call for the replacement of the government of oligarchs and warmongers with a government of the workers, the vast majority of society. Only in this way can society’s resources be used in a rational and humane manner.