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More than 3,200 Boeing workers voted on Sunday to reject the second four-year contract proposal brought to them by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 837. The workers walked out on strike just after midnight Monday morning.
The strike against the aerospace giant Boeing is at the same time a fight against the Trump administration, which has awarded the company a multibillion-dollar contract to build fighter jets in preparation for war against China.
Last week, workers overwhelmingly rejected a contract proposal endorsed by union leaders. A central issue in the negotiations is the Alternative Work Schedule (AWS) in which Boeing is demanding the right to impose four consecutive 10-hour shifts Monday to Friday or three consecutive 12-hour shifts Friday to Monday.
The latest proposal excludes the AWS, leaving work hours and overtime unchanged. It also includes a $0.50 hourly pay increase and increased the pension multiplier to $10 in the first year, instead of $5 in the second and third years. But this does not apply to the most senior workers, according to the IAM. A 20 percent wage increase over four years and a $5,000 ratification bonus remain the same as the previous proposal.
“It is our last, best and final offer and, we think, a very compelling offer,” Boeing Vice President of Air Dominance Dan Gillian said from St. Louis. The company announced that non-union workers will operate the facility, and production will continue on a limited basis, a dangerous prospect for a company with one of the worst safety records in the industry.
Boeing awarded $20 billion for “air dominance”
Boeing’s facility in St. Louis produces for the company’s defense division, which supplies planes and bombs used in Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza and in the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
The company is among the largest employers in the St. Louis metro area and employs more than 16,000 across three plants in the area, according to Business Journal.
In its relentless pursuit of profits, Boeing has been responsible for a series of catastrophic aircraft failures. Numerous high-profile disasters killed more than 330 people in two crashes in 2018 and 2019 and injured countless others in the course of mid-air malfunctions. In June, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed in India killing 260 people. The FAA earlier this year would not lift a 38-plane per year limit on the 737 MAX.
After a mid-air panel blowout on a brand new Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 airplane that lacked four key bolts, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in March of this year that Boeing had “lost trust.” But after meeting with company executives, Duffy announced, “They get it, and they are making the changes in manufacturing.”
Later that month, the company was awarded a contract reported to come in at $20 billion to build the latest F-series fighter jet as part of American imperialism’s preparations for war with China. The St. Louis plant is essential in building the Air Force’s fighter jet, the F-47 in a program known as Next Generation Air Dominance.
The Trump administration views the project as highly sensitive. National Security Journal wrote on the negotiations, “... if President Trump feels like the two sides are dragging their feet, it would not be out of the realm of possibility that he’d get involved.”
In addition to this massive cash infusion, Boeing also sought about $155 million in local tax breaks for a related airport-based expansion project in exchange for guaranteeing just 500 new jobs, an unpopular giveaway that local politicians bent over backwards to justify.
A strike with political repercussions
Boeing workers are walking out on a hated corporation, behind which stands a deeply hated administration, against which tens of millions of Americans have protested, and its pro-war enablers in the Democratic Party. The strike will inevitably generate huge support among millions across the country and the world opposed to the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and other criminal ventures sponsored by US imperialism.
From the standpoint of American capitalism, the strike hits at a critical portion of the military-industrial complex. Preparations are being made to prepare for massive new wars against China, Iran and other official enemies of US capitalism on a scale not seen since World War II. This requires all sectors of the economy to be subordinated to war and the suppression of opposition in the “home front.”
But the massive cuts to Medicaid, schools and other social spending, the use of tariffs as a regressive tax on working class consumers and other measures which, in the final analysis, are to free up resources for war are generating tremendous opposition and anger in the working class. The ground is being set for open class conflict not seen in the US in generations.
The capitalist class does not only have strategic enemies abroad; its biggest enemy is in the “home front” in the form of the American working class. The determined action of Boeing workers directly asserts the working class’s fight for its rights against the ruling elite’s program of war abroad and dictatorship at home.
Form rank-and-file committees to enforce workers’ demands
The union bureaucracy is doing its level best to prove its usefulness to the American war machine, with the United Auto Workers proposing using closed auto plants for military production and union officials across the country backing Trump’s “America First” nationalism. The IAM bureaucracy is playing a critical role as well.
It has already brought two unacceptable contracts to the membership and will do everything it can to settle the dispute quickly, and to the benefit of Boeing and the Trump administration
Last autumn, in what emerged as a semi-rebellion against the IAM leadership, more than 30,000 Seattle-area Boeing workers waged a determined strike for seven weeks. Workers had voted down two IAM-backed proposals that failed to meet rank-and-file demands for a 40 percent raise over three years in the Pacific Northwest, where housing and living costs are out of control, and to restore the pensions that were taken away in 2014.
After workers fought for weeks on $250 per week in strike pay, IAM leaders forced through a third deal that did not meet the demands of the membership—a 38 percent raise over four years and no pensions. Significantly, the final vote took place the day before the November presidential election.
Before the strike had even concluded, the company announced the layoff of 17,000 workers, or about 10 percent of its total workforce, a vicious blow which the IAM made no issue of. In the St. Louis area, 700 were laid off.
Boeing workers must prepare for a serious fight against not just Boeing management but the government and the capitalist ruling class. There can be no doubt that the federal government is already working behind the scenes with both the IAM and Boeing to shut down the strike as soon as possible. If that fails, the fascistic Trump will not hesitate to use more open methods to break the strike.
Against this must be brought to bear the far greater power of the American and world working class. Workers must mobilize in support behind the strike, while Boeing workers should do everything possible to expand the strike, including to Boeing workers throughout the St. Louis region and the country.
This fight can only take place through a rank-and-file rebellion against the IAM apparatus, with workers asserting democratic control over every aspect of the strike and negotiations, while defeating the union’s efforts to isolate the strike. The organizational building blocks of this rebellion are rank-and-file committees, organized by workers themselves and excluding union bureaucrats, which fight to transfer power back to the shop floor.
In the Seattle-area Boeing strike last year, workers formed the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which declared at the time: “It has become absolutely clear that if we are to win this strike, we have to overthrow the dead weight of the IAM union bureaucracy. They are acting as errand boys for Boeing executives and for the government.”
It concluded: “Wall Street backs Boeing because they know that the real issue in our strike is this: Who controls the world’s wealth? The workers who create it or the capitalists who exploit us?”
The lessons of that strike must be brought forward into the present struggle in St. Louis through the formation of a rank-and-file strike committee. To get involved, fill out the form below.