33,000 Machinists strike at Boeing

Seattle

Some 33,000 in the International Association of Machinists District 751 walked out at midnight Sept. 13 from five major Boeing plants in the Seattle area and one in Portland, Oregon, and at some smaller installations. The strikers have many pent-up issues with Boeing over the company’s anti-labor crusade in the 2000s.

Boeing’s union-busting threats to move commercial airplane production to the South forced the IAM to make concessions in contracts earlier this century. The threats are real. Boeing has already moved major production of the new 787 plane to South Carolina, a non-union shop in a “right-to-work” state.

As a result, IAM 751 members have gone 16 years without a new contract, in other words, 16 years without a raise or any other new benefits except for tiny cost-of-living increases. Also, the threats to move production of a new 777 freighter pressured the machinists into giving up their defined-benefit pensions.

If Boeing thought they could get away with all these attacks, the strike showed them they couldn’t. Their Northwest plants are all shut down, and all indications show the workers are fighting mad.

Boeings’ tentative contract offer shows the company was operating in some alternative universe from the workers. The IAM demanded a 40% wage increase over four years. But the company offered only 25%. Also, the company offered no bonus, although the workers had usually received yearly bonuses. 

Massive support for strike

Workers quickly saw that a 25% raise failed to even keep up with inflation. They wanted their defined-benefit pension restored, but Boeing offered nothing much new for their years of service. So the machinists voted 94.6% to reject the contract and 96% to strike. 

Little or no progress was made toward the demand to reduce workers’ health care costs or the job security issue that would ensure that the next generation plane is built in the Puget Sound (Seattle) region.

The Machinists at Boeing held regular lunch-time marches through all the plants for over a month in the run-up to the strike. They’ve been saving their money in preparation. They have the experience of four militant strikes against Boeing between 1989 and 2008.

They oppose any concessionary bargaining between the IAM 751 leadership and the Boeing bosses.

There’s much more to this story involving Boeing’s cost-cutting, truly massive layoffs, outsourcing of parts to Boeing’s global supply chain, union-busting and more, all to increase Boeing’s bottom line. While the capitalist class running the country has expressed dismay at Boeing’s serious production problems — also tied to maximizing profits — it has ignored what all these catastrophic changes have done to the workers who build all the planes.

Union solidarity

Joining the IAM 751 Machinists on the picket line the first day were workers from the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which has over 10,000 members who work at Boeing. These workers continue working during the Machinists’ strike, but will refuse to do the machinists’ production jobs.

 Other unions like the United Auto Workers and the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) joined the machinists in a general uproar of chanting and horn honking as the strike kicked off.

The Machinists are joining the rising tide of a revitalized movement both in the U.S. and internationally. The working class is being pushed to the wall by the bosses, but these workers have a perspective of unity and struggle and a growing class-consciousness to take a great leap forward against capital.