by Samuel Messidor
The International Association of Machine and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and Boeing have reached a tentative agreement (TA) one month into the Boeing strike which has seen 33,000 workers organized under the IAM withholding their labor in the Northwest. The rank-and-file are set to vote on the new agreement Wednesday. If a simple majority votes to accept the TA, then the strike will end.
In September, 95% of Boeing workers voted to reject the first tentative agreement and begin the strike after denouncing the first sell-out agreement and marching on lunch break walkouts through the factories with calls to strike. According to a Boeing executive, the strike is hitting the monopoly at a rate of $3-4 billion a month.
The newly-proposed agreement offers a 35% wage increase over four years, but does not adequately meet the workers’ demands for a pay raise, reinstatement of pension plans, or ending mandatory weekend overtime—the union brass brags that mandatory overtime would be reduced, but the language allows the company to override the reduction at will.
Multiple whistle blowers have come forward at Boeing over the last year—with two dying shortly thereafter under suspicious circumstances—raising the alarm on breakneck tempo increases at the expense of safety and quality standards, in the attempt to drive up the rate of exploitation of the workers. The union chiefs have been trying to sell the “compromises” of the latest TA— really a loss for the workers—to union members, alongside the government and monopolists, with rhetoric of making the decrepit monopoly great again through a new contract. The union brass gives the rank-and-file only $250 a week in strike payments to maintain the fight.
Last week, the White House sent Labor Secretary Julie Su to get the Boeing workers back onto the production line, a task she just returned from at the longshoremen’s short-lived picket lines across the East Coast. This is yet another in a list of interventions to cut strikes short by the self-described “most pro-labor President in history”.
Meanwhile, Boeing has announced that it will begin to lay off 17,000 workers across management and production in an unspecified time frame according to their CEO. Boeing’s off-shoot company Spirit Aerosystems is itself furloughing thousands of workers, scapegoating the strike despite being in the midst of its own financial straits rocked by the ongoing economic crisis before the strike.
image: Striking workers in Moses Lake, WA. The message references the overwhelming rejection of the first, sell-out agreement proposed by the union bureaucracy and management in September. IAM751 social media
