Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Bankrupt IAM International Leadership Betrays Boeing Workers

Bankrupt IAM International Leadership Betrays Boeing Workers

In yet another significant major defeat for organized labor, the top leadership of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) in secret negotiations with Boeing, reopened the contract and shoved through a vote of the membership to accept devastating concessions.  Devastating not only for the Boeing workers but for all workers who look to their unions to protect defined pensions and wage packages. The contract was not even set to expire until 2016, and despite the fighting spirit of the membership demonstrated by an initial overwhelming NO vote, the IAM leaders bowed down to Boeing’s blackmail threat to move future production to as yet non-existent, non-union plants, in areas lacking the skilled labor force needed to construct the 777X, This sell-out contract will eliminate the defined pension plan in 2016. Workers will pay large increases in medical premiums and will receive a paltry 1% yearly raise.  Boeing new hires will need 20 years plus employment to reach the maximum pay grade, more than three times what it takes now.  The contract will extend to an indentured servant-like eight years from 2016 to 2024, with workers bound hand and foot to a no strike clause.

The first vote in November was overwhelmingly rejected by the 31,000 IAM ranks, with 67% opposing the 8-year contract extension scam.  Coming out in force to vote, the Machinist ranks booed the union leader sellouts that were pushing concessions.  As one Machinist stated, “I’ve never seen a turnout like this.  There was very little in the way of signs or banners. Just a lot of workers making sure they had their say.”[1]

The auxiliaries of the Democratic Party within the workers movement did their job for the ruling class, while Democratic Party politicians that included Washington Governor Jay Inslee, the mayors of Seattle and Everett, and U.S. Senator Patty Murray jumped into the fray demanding that the IAM accept concessions.  The “International” betrayed the membership from the first, bringing a rotten tentative agreement out of their secret meetings with the bosses. When the ranks rejected it, the IAM tops stepped in and forced a second vote. By changing the procedural manner of the vote counts and holding it during the Holiday season on January 3^rd, they got it to narrowly pass amid allegations by the ranks of voter suppression and manipulation.  As a 35-year Machinist wrote a few days before the vote in Labor Notes:

“This is the one time of year when our membership is completely atomized. Not only are there no union meetings, but we won’t even be able to talk to each other at work! The whole thing stinks.  A complicated absentee ballot process was worked up.“[2]

 

Another Major Defeat for Organized Labor

This is a defeat for the whole working class.   Everywhere pensions are under attack like in Detroit and Chicago, and this defeat will only accelerate those attacks for workers who still have pensions.  “Work until you die” is becoming the harsh reality for workers everywhere.   We Say everyone should be guaranteed a full pension and free, quality healthcare and education, whether they are a Boeing IAM mechanic, Industrial, Agricultural, Office, or Public worker,  a teacher or a low-wage fast food worker, and  even the victims of long term structural underemployment must be provided a safety net that ends poverty. Socialists called the Johnson War On Poverty a fake at the time and we have witnessed a 50-year war on the poor run by the Republican and Democratic administrations alike!  They have devastated and impoverished the black and brown communities, swelled the prisons with millions of unwanted workers and subverted public education, while militarizing the police forces, which terrorize the working class and poor communities.  The capitalist government has proven it cannot provide the basic economic and social guarantees of the American Dream.  Their only concern is protecting the 0.1%.

This attack comes at a time when Boeing is enjoying huge profits and tax breaks.  And even with the concessions, Boeing reserved the right to move sub-assembly production at will.  Boeing employs a skilled workforce and they would have to invest in a new plant and find qualified workers to do the job.  And meanwhile Airbus would be right there, ready to jump in and snap up the IAM workers if Boeing relocated.  Thus there was no excuse for the IAM leaders to cave without a fight.

Not Labor Leaders, but the Labor Lieutenants of Capital

As a Machinist wrote of IAM International President Buffenbarger:

“On December 26 Buffenbarger posted a letter on the IAM website that channels Boeing management.

There is no hint of any fight in him; and his portrayal of the contract offer is misleading in the extreme. He paints this offer as a substantial improvement over the first offer (the one we rejected 2-1), by counting as an almost $1 billion gain the fact that we are to keep the progression step system exactly as it has been for almost two decades! Never mind the fact that the only reason we kept it is that we voted down the first offer, which he spoke of in equally glowing terms! In his calculation of the “gains,” there is no mention of the enormous cut in retirement benefits.”[3]

After the second vote’s results were announced, “…top officials at the Machinists national headquarters and in Gov. Jay Inslee’s office were almost giddy….”, the Seattle Times reported, “…It’s going to be sunny in Seattle for another 40 or 50 years…,” gushed Rich Michalski, who represented the International Association of Machinists (IAM) national headquarters in the 777X negotiations. “Boeing is going to be here forever now.”[4]

 

The Seattle Times further reported:

“The IAM International’s Michalski, who was in Seattle for the Friday vote, emphasized the “silver lining” of job security.  “If you’re a young person, you’ve got a future here in aerospace,” Michalski said. “Parents and grandparents should be happy….It’s all about being able to compete with the rest of the world,” he added, expressing a common sentiment with Boeing executives.”

Wisconsin, Michigan, the Longview ILWU struggle, the Chicago Teacher’s strike, the BART strike…American workers have been willing to wage struggle, but have been betrayed at every step by the chauvinist, bankrupt, pro-capitalist union tops and officials.  From secretly meeting with Boeing to reopen the contract to concessions, to pushing for a shady second vote, the IAM bureaucrats were determined to shove this down the workers’ throats.  Bowing to pressure from the workers, the local leadership, the lower echelons of the bureaucratic apparatus, for a period swung to the side of the outraged workers, but later closed ranks again with the International union tops. This demonstrates in miniature what threat an organized, militant rank and file presents to these labor traitors at the top of our unions and how brittle the hold of this parasitic caste really is. They must maintain an atomized rank and file, so as to count upon a subdued consenting membership which only comes out at its command, and then mostly to phone bank for the Democrats.

As the CWG wrote previously:

 “The union bureaucracy is a privileged caste within the workers’ movement that derives and maintains its privilege by accommodating the entire power of the working class to capital through political subordination to the bosses’ governmental apparatus. This is accomplished through the thousands of networks that chain labor’s organizations to Big Business’s company management, its state, and its political parties. In order to fight, a new generation of worker militants must rise up from the ranks that understand that there can be no compromise between Labor and Capital! The real power lies with the organized working class in alliance with the oppressed based on a political program of irreconcilable struggle against capitalism.  We would not have a labor movement today if past generations of workers had not defied the union-busting laws, injunctions and strike-breaking cops and hired strikebreakers; had not organized mass pickets that stopped scabs, flying pickets and sit-down strikes; or had they relied on Democratic Party politicians instead of their own collective strength.”[5]

The Democratic Party labor-fakers and other union officials unwilling to fight the bosses are an ideological obstacle and need to be swept aside by a resurgent labor movement, so that workers can defend and advance their own interests.  The historic gains of labor are all quickly disappearing.  The bosses recognize their class interests and they wantonly wage a one-sided class war against the unions, the non-union and precarious workers and the oppressed.  Class conscious workers must not let this state of affairs continue.

Left Tails of the Union Bureaucracy

The Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) has a considerable historic membership and presence in the Seattle area and they could be expected to have trenchant advice for the local labor movement but let’s look at what they said. In a November 11^th Facebook post they tell workers to “…Urge your union to mobilize now to support the Machinists and to withdraw all financial contributions from legislators who voted for this outrageous package…,”  the CWG would ask the FSP how does this differ from the Gompers policy to reward the ‘friends of labor and punish our enemies’?  They say “…Give your legislators an earful. The legislative hotline is 800-562-6000. Tell them to fund social services not corporate greed.”, and for Washington State (i.e. the bourgeois state) to confiscate Boeing’s “state-subsidized land, buildings and equipment!” because “the entire state would benefit.”  If only the capitalist state and the politicians could see the error of their ways![6]  Does the FSP take a page from Labor’s Untold Story and advocate what is objectively called for, sit down strikes and factory occupations?  No not a word!  Instead of calling on the workers to seize Boeing and run it under workers control the FSP peddles a bogus nationalization, calling on the bosses state to confiscate property paid for by the taxpayer.  They tell workers to phone the bosses pet legislators, as if that were a tactic that had ever worked for the working class! Clara Fraser must be turning over in her grave.  And labor’s untold story remains untold by the FSP!

For their part, the International Socialist Organization (ISO-US,) touts the union “rank and file” divorced from a class struggle political program, with a little bit of trade union militancy thrown in for left-cred.  Like much of the left, the ISO will not take on the political fight within the labor movement to oust the servile, treacherous Democratic Party union bureaucracy.

Thus the ISO writes:

 

“Hopefully, IAM members David Clay and Shannon Ryker can unite with other machinists who think like them in building a new rank-and-file network of activists at Boeing–one that can stand up to management, and can provide a lead independent of the union when its leaders refuse to fight.”[7]

“When” the union leaders refuse to fight???   Where in the hell has the ISO been over the last several decades?  From PATCO to the UAW to Wisconsin to Michigan to the ILWU struggles to the CTU strike to Boeing, at every step of the way the class collaborationist union misleadership not only refuses to do what is necessary to win, but seeks to channel class struggle into insipid legalism and impotent electoral politics, if not outright surrender.  It will take more than a “rank-and-file network of activists” to transform our unions into organizations the working class can use to defend our standard of living; class struggle caucuses committed to political independence and class struggle methods are required.

In Chicago the ISO’s method was to betray the solid, militant 2012 Chicago Teacher’s strike and accept concessions.[8]  They pushed to end the strike and take the concessions at the point the strike was having an national impact and was nowhere near being broken. Within the Teacher’s Union their supporters in the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), formed on the basis of a minimal program of union democracy, strong contract and improving education, sold out in the interest of maintaining their alliance with fake left Democrat

“strategic partners”.  To this day the ISO CORE members will neither take their share of the blame nor will they attribute the share of the blame to their strategic partners, and they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  They put off for another day the fight to save neighborhood schools from closing and Rahm Emanuel succeeded in closing more than 50 of them, without the membership resuming the strike, or even waging effective job actions. This is the ISO’s real record; this is not just our opinion.   This was a sellout no less in essence than what the IAM union tops cooked up in collusion with the Boeing bosses.  This was betrayal with a “left” face.[9]

Members need to realize the union leaders are not the labor movement.  We don’t need workers providing a “lead” as the ISO says, “independent of the union,” (at least not in most cases,) discarding the union structure for new organizational forms.  This is a question of tactics.  The union bureaucracy is only one part of the labor movement, analogous to a cancerous tumor on the labor body.  Our unions belong to the workers as a whole.  The workers need to politically separate themselves from the union labor fakers, not the unions themselves, which-in most cases-are still workers organizations, despite their bureaucratized stagnation and prostration before the Democratic Party.  We do need rank and file movements for union democracy and accountability, but their victory depends on workers taking on a consciously political fight within against class collaboration and for a class struggle program of workers’ self-organization.

Trade unions still represent the organized section of the working class in America.  Leftists will face the same political questions and the same political tasks trying to organize workers independently of the trade unions.  The problem is, our centrist and reformists opponents on left have no political program to take on the union bureaucracy and they become content in their own little leftist sandboxes, at times coming out to play as the left mobilizers of audiences for the union tops, filling in radical voids in the division of labor for the union bureaucracy.  See CWG’s critique of the centrists and reformists inside the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee (TWSC) in Class Warrior #5: BART STRIKES: Once again on the method and relevance of Trotsky’s Transitional Program for a more in-depth analysis.[10]

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which as today’s radical chic is attracting militant youth, will criticize the AFL-CIO/Change to Win unions as business unions.  However, in Wisconsin, while they were agitating for a general strike, the IWW was not waging a political struggle against the Democratic Party union leaders who were leading workers to defeat through the recall petition campaign.  Nor were they trying to break the workers from their illusions in the Democratic Party.  The IWW makes what we call an objectivist error.  They offer very little in the way of political program and see little need for one.  For them, their favorite line from Karl Marx is the objectively revolutionary character of the working class.  For us this is a variety of idealism that relies on a magical, spontaneous development of class political consciousness.  This magical development is to result in the working class leaving bourgeois politics and bourgeois parties behind, so there is no reason to politically challenge the friendly reformists’ and their recall campaign.  The IWW saves its fire for advocates of the fighting workers labor party, which they see as more bourgeois politics.   In contrast, the CWG does not have a “we won’t step on your toes” gentleman’s agreement with either the union tops or the bosses’ political parties or the capitalist system.  Ours is the dialectical view that requires the vanguard to bring the revolutionary class political consciousness to the working masses.  We do not expect the worker masses to guess what the product of 175 years of Marxist analysis has produced.   We don’t run from the fight for a workers’ political program, either within the unions or among the vast mass of the unorganized workers and the oppressed.

The CWI’s 15 minutes of fame

 

On the job a usual term of derision among our fellow workers is to call someone a “politician” this is a gut level correct evaluation and historically it is a conquest of the IWW from its earliest days when they understood that voting gets the workers nothing or nothing good. Of course this immediately caused a contradiction and a problem for IWWers who knew socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs as the great organizer of the rail road unions.  Debsian model revolutionary electoral work still resonates for us and exists in renewed vivid contrast in the glare of Socialist Alternatives (Soc.Alt.) recent Seattle city council victory.  Kshama Sawant, member of Soc.Alt. the Committee for a Workers International organization in the USA ran a centrist campaign properly-so-called.  Because Sawant has captured the national spotlight, outfits like the FSP and ISO bury whatever their criticisms might be and hope to be identified with her.  So like the FSP, the ISO fails to call for sit-down strikes at Boeing and industry-wide.  Instead they play up socialist Kshama Sawant’s election victory as the way forward for workers in general and for the IAM.  So we find Socialist Worker saying…

“With “friends” of working people like the Democrats, who needs enemies? The IAM would do well in the future to follow the lead of the brave local unions that backed the Seattle City Council campaign of Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant. Political independence from both corporate parties is imperative if labor is ever going to get free of the stranglehold of the two-party corporate political system in the U.S.”[11]

They correctly call for class independence, but fail to mention the burning need for a class struggle fighting workers/labor party to organize and lead struggle against capital.  And what about political program?

The purpose of socialists running for bourgeois political office is not to invest the electoral process with illusions, but to use the election and office for propaganda and agitation, to bring a revolutionary Marxist program to the working class.  On Nov. 21, 2013, Seattle’s newly elected Socialist councilwoman Sawant told Boeing workers at a rally:

“The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine…..The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”[12]

This militancy definitely found an audience among the workers at the rally, as well as across the nation and internationally.  But talk is cheap and advocating labor militancy is not enough while singing Kumbaya on a platform of labor leaders and Democrats.  Sawant, who was elected primarily on a liberal/populist reformist program of a $15 minimum wage, “tax the rich” and affordable housing, failed to mention the class collaborationist union bureaucracy or the capitalist state and their repressive apparatus during this speech.  In contrast, the CWG says that the workers should take over not only one Boeing operation, but the entire transport industry without any compensation to any of the major shareholders and run it under democratic workers control. But that requires workers developing an independent, class struggle political program, methods and organization if they are to win.  Had Sawant called for expropriation, she would have still found wide favor among the working class.  Of course this would have alienated her liberal/progressive allies, which is excluded for the CWI.  It certainly might have upset Socialist Alternative’s (Soc.Alt.) 15now[13] coalition and the fight for what even Soc.Alt. says in NYC is a non-living, poverty wage[14] (CWG in contrast says $15 is not a Living Wage, period).

 

The Way Forward for Boeing Workers

 

Boeing workers, justifiably outraged, have filed NLRB unfair labor practice charges against the IAM International to “overturn the 777X contract extension vote that passed by a slim margin.”[15]  This is misguided and demonstrates the backwardness of American workers class consciousness which the AFL-CIO/Change to Win labor tops have worked overtime to repress.  The fight against the union bureaucracy is primarily a political fight and they will not be defeated through legalistic maneuvers.  Using labor laws, the courts and labor boards against the bosses or non-worker/non-leftist organizations is a viable tactic when used to expose the state and the system, but cannot substitute as a path to victory.  Only the workers own self-directed mass actions and political independence can conquer historic gains for the entire class.

Many trade unionists think the NLRB, the courts and the government are neutral or that they will work in labor’s interest.   This is a dangerous illusion, as even the gains encompassed in labor laws, such as the formal (but not practical,) legal right to unionize (which should be defended,) are double-edged swords.  The whole legalistic system of collective bargaining, arbitration and government labor agencies arose as a means for the ruling class to contain working class struggles within the framework of a formal system of labor laws.  Workers were organizing unions without legal blessing and engaging in strikes (and always will), particularly during the rise of the industrial unions of the CIO, so the bosses needed a method to divert all this energy into safer, non-disruptive channels that would not shut down production.  CWG says: No illusions or reliance on the NLRB, labor laws, the courts or binding arbitration!  No lawsuits or NLRB charges against workers’ organizations!  Government out of the labor movement!  Labor must clean its own house!

There’s the idea that the NLRB complaint is what is needed NOW, before the ink is dry on the contract extension, but this is also wrong. The concessions are not retroactive; they go into effect in the extension (in 2016).  So right now is the time to fight for a mass Emergency IAM Convention of the entire union to throw out the Buffenbargers for having done this to Machinist Lodge No. 751, to denounce them and run them off and replace them with militants that understand we are in a class war and that the working class needs to play for keeps. The “Barffenbaggers” will try to block this bureaucratically, of course, but an organized, insurgent rank and file that has a clear understanding of the situation and the political tasks can defeat the labor skates.  Organize rank and file class struggle caucuses/committees to throw out the bankrupt union leadership!  We need accountable worker leaders who are willing to organize and lead an uncompromising fight under democratic rank and file direction!  All union positions from the local through the international should be elected and subject to immediate recall by a vote at any time by the ranks! No union official should get paid more than the highest paid worker they represent!

 

Once the IAM ranks send the labor traitors within the IAM back to the shop floor to work for a living, mass rank and file democratic strike committees can be convened to organize and defeat the Boeing concessions. An injury to one is an injury to all! No more concessions!  Draw a line in the sand! For industry-wide solidarity/general strikes and class struggle tactics such as flying pickets, mass picket lines, sit-down strikes and hot-cargoing to win! This is how the unions were built and how we can start to defend them and rollback these attacks.

Of course, these tactics will immediately come up against the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, the anti-labor laws and the courts/cops.  Almost every member of ILWU (Longshoremen) Local 21 in Longview were arrested during their recent struggle and the Obama administration deployed the Coast Guard, using the military for union-busting.  The Longshoremen were not defeated by the state though, but by their own servile International leadership who forced a concessionary agreement on them, just like the IAM International is doing now.

In 1966, the transit workers in New York City went out on strike and were hit with a strike-breaking injunction.  Mike Quill, the leader of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) told the judge he “can drop dead in his black robes. I don’t care if I rot in jail. I will not call off the strike.“[16]  He was true to his word. He didn’t call off the strike and he was jailed.  But the workers won!  Taft-Hartley and strike-breaking injunctions can be smashed through united struggle!  For the AFL-CIO/Change to Win labor tops that are not willing to do what it takes, may we suggest they need to change careers and find one of those forthcoming $15/hour fast food jobs.

Fight for a Workers’ Political Program of Struggle to Win

The fight for jobs can unite the entire class with all the oppressed.  This requires a struggle not for a minimum wage, but for jobs for all through spreading the work around through a sliding scale of wages and hours.  For a 30 hour work week at 40 hours pay!  A Living Wage historically is a wage that is the prevailing union rate. In cases where the union wage falls short, a living wage must be fought for!  The living wage should be determined by mass assemblies of labor, labors’ own wage and price committees, and not by the Democratic Party, their union bureaucratic hacks or their reformist coattails, and ultimately without a doubt the living wage will be enforced through united labor actions, not elections, petitions, or referenda.  The living wage can only be realized through struggle, through organizing the unorganized “wall-to-wall”.

Boeing workers should seize the plant, but it should not stop there.  Workers should nationalize without compensation to the major shareholders the finance sector along with major industries. These then can be run under democratic workers control. This way job necessity can be determined by the workers, by social need and not the dictates of profit.

Political demands require a political party.  Thus, in order to win workers must break from the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties and build a fighting, class struggle workers/labor party which opposes the anarchy of the profit system. Such a party would mobilize the working class to save Boeing jobs at home and to organize international solidarity with our working class sisters and brothers abroad, such as the Korean railway workers who today fight the privatization schemes of the ruling class. Such a party would fight for a government of the working class to organize a rational, planned socialist economy committed to ending exploitation and oppression, to recovering from the economic devastation and environmental destruction capitalism in its decay has wrought.

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