Boeing Ford, Stellantis, Dockworkers. Opportunity Knocks Once Again for Organized Labor

 

Source: Al Jazeera

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

September 20-21 2004

 

Workers, members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 75 in Seattle Washington, are in the second week of their strike against the Boeing Corporation.  The vote to strike was almost unanimous with 96% voting yes.

 

This week, Boeing management announced it is planning to furlough (nice euphemism for layoff) thousands of Boeing’s non-union workers . After a negotiation session Tuesday, union negotiators told the membership in a letter that, “We will not mince words – after a full day of mediation, we are frustrated. The company was not prepared and was unwilling to address the issues you’ve made clear are essential for ending this strike: Wages and Pension,”.

 

As a veteran of three separate contract negotiations for my union, 1982, 1985 when we struck, and 1997, I can assure my brothers and sisters at Boeing that Boeing management were prepared. They were prepared to give the union negotiators the run around, to test them and see their reaction.

In the last negotiations I was in we had five reps from my union. The management also had a union and were in talks and they got six seats at the table. The employer covered the costs of the union reps during negotiations. At the very first session when we realized the supervisors had six paid reps and we got five, we objected. The boss dug in so we made it clear we didn’t need to be there and could spend the time in the field educating and mobilizing our members; building our solidarity committee we formed to reach out to other unions and workplaces and the wider community. It would have been an indication of weakness from the get go had we acted differently, our time was better spent building the strike. We got up to leave. We got our sixth representative paid.

 

Brian Bryant, the head of the AIM national union visited picket lines in Washington and Oregon this week and we heard the usual nice sounding phrases from him, “The IAM and our 600,000 members have the backs of every single striking Boeing worker in this nation.” This sounds nice if it’s the first time you’ve heard it but means nothing to be honest. In and of itself, it’s just bluster.

 

In media interviews he attacked the management for blaming the workers for Boeing’s problems that didn’t stop the company from rewarding top bosses millions of dollars in compensation. “None of Boeing’s problems have anything to do with these workers………all of the things that are wrong with Boeing right now are all attributed to bad decisions from corporate. …” he told Flying Magazine.

 

Bryant warned the bosses that, “…it will take a fair contract to resolve this strike and that members are resolved to wait as long as necessary to get that.”

 

“Wait as long as necessary”?

 

Such confidence can only come from an individual with a decent paycheck (Bryant’s income is somewhere around $300,000 a year) and who is likely not losing any pay during the strike. Strike pay from what I understand is $250 a week and while morale is always good in the beginning of disputes like these as workers get a real feel of the potential power we do have, the bosses know if they can keep them out long enough they will wear them down. Bryant knows it too. The first shot across the bow in our strike was a letter from the company (I was in the public sector) reminding us that our health benefits would be ending at the end of the month. With no national health care system in the US, what health care workers have is often through the employer.

 

With the average debt in America at $104,215 across mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and credit cards, we can’t walk picket lines forever.  Washington, Oregon and California residents are among the nations most indebted, with the average Washington resident in debt to the tune of $180,000 according to Experien, and this debt weighs heavily on working class people and our families. Every decision we make has to take this in to account and let’s not forget that the biggest contributor to bankruptcy in the US is health costs. American workers are in debt bondage.

 

So the bosses’ attitude at the early stages of negotiations is not driven by an unwillingness to take part or not being prepared. It is a strategy that every union activist should be all too familiar with and the IAM officials need to make that clear to the members and respond accordingly.  But we can almost guarantee that they won’t.

 

The fact that the IAM president can repeat the ridiculous statement that his members can wait as long as it takes to get what they need from the boss, shows how disconnected he is from the reality his members live with. Waiting doesn’t win strikes. Waiting is not a tactic for improving our material conditions.

 

Fighting defensive battles do not by their very nature improve conditions in the long run. Nor does isolating labor disputes to struggles between one union and one employer. Unfortunately, the national IAM (and entire AFL-CIO) leadership is committed to the Team Concept philosophy when it comes to labor relations. This is the view that workers and bosses, capital and labor, have the same economic interests; are partners. It is this view and the strategy and tactics that flow from it, that is at the root of the decades of defeats and betrayals.

 

Potential to build union power
At the same time the Boeing workers are striking this major industrial US corporation, 45,000 dockworkers along the U.S. East and GulfCoasts are threatening to strike on October first to halt the loss of thousands of jobs due to automation. In addition, United Auto Workers at the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn Michigan have been told by UAW president Shawn Fain that they can set a strike deadline for 11:59 p.m., Wednesday, Sept 25,” and the union is also threatening to strike Stellantis after not reaching an agreement for more than a year.

 

We have seen an uptick in strike activity over the last period and increased efforts among the unorganized to unionize including at Starbucks, Amazon, among tech workers and other non-union sectors. This lays the groundwork for a generalized national campaign by workers, organized and unorganized against the offensive of capital that is being carried out through both major parties. There is the potential once again for a united national workers movement and a more powerful labor presence.

 

One of the main reasons strikes have been defeated over the past period is not due to the weakness of the organized working class, or the working class in general, rather the refusal of the heads of organized labor to tap to the powerful mood that exists in society for change. Consequently, battles are fought in isolation and demands limited to what are acceptable to the union hierarchy and their allies in the Democratic Party.

 

There is strong support throughout the US for unions and for workers’ right to strike to defend our wages, benefits and working conditions despite Biden and the US Congress denying that right to railway workers last year in order to defend railroad bosses’ profits.

 

 A recent AFL-CIO national survey reported that:

“More than three fourths believe unions have a positive impact on these important issues: workplace safety (82%), fair compensation and hours (78%), job security (77%), access to affordable health care (76%), retirement security (76%), ability to support their families (76%).

 

 

However, as we can see with the developments at Boeing, among dockworkers and auto, three areas where workers have immense potential power, that we are anything but weak and that the opportunity for a powerful offensive of our own knocks once again. But rest assured the heads of organized labor will likely snatch defeat from the jaws of victory’ will be “realistic” and act responsibly. Their collective world view, that capitalism and the market is the answer to all things, that profits are sacrosanct and that when capitalism goes it to crisis they, or their members and workers in general must bail it out will win the day.

 

It is the task of organized labor’s rank and file to transform these organizations that took heroic sacrifice to build. Any opposition groups within organized labor can start with a condemnation and campaign against the Team Concept.

 

I confess to being a bit repetitive with regards to these views on the class struggle and labor disputes, and that workers that read this blog might tire of it. But because organized labor’s hierarchy refuses to abandon what is a decades old strategy of class collaboration doesn’t make what I suggest here wrong. We cannot win with the present approach. We have to recognize that we have to challenge and violate anti-union laws. Unions were not built by obeying laws.

 

I should add that having a federal mediator in negotiations is not having a neutral party present as we are led to believe. A federal mediator is a representative of the state just like a judge. The mediator is after peace at the workers’ expense.

 

Lastly, here is a video I made 10 years ago when the national IAM leadership, with help from the Democratic Party politicians, and the media orchestrated a yes vote to a contract the Boeing workers rejected only a month earlier. Readers might be interested in a little bit of the history between these two parties.