BY GEOFF MIRELOWITZ
SEATTLE - "When Jobs Go South," read the November 12 Seattle Post-Intelligencer front-page headline. That day some 4,000 workers rallied to back the six-week-old International Association of Machinists (IAM) strike against Boeing.
Contingents from many unions turned out, joined by activists from community groups. The spirit of solidarity was in the air.
The issues posed by the Seattle daily were on everyone's mind. What is the future for working people? How can we avoid unemployment? Is there any job security in the "global market?"
Featured speakers were the newly elected leadership of the AFL-CIO - President John Sweeney, Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, and Executive Vice President Linda Chavez- Thompson - as well as IAM president George Kourpias. The crowd greeted them enthusiastically, encouraged by their appearance and their pledge to back the strike.
A central issue is Boeing's demand, raised in the final hours of negotiations, that workers bear a higher burden of medical costs. This provoked outrage that a company that has raked in over $6 billion in profits since 1990 now wants workers to pay hundreds of dollars or more each year for health care.
Looming over the strike, however, is the issue of job security. Discussions with strikers inevitably turn to what is known as "outsourcing" - Boeing's growing practice of producing parts at overseas facilities and nonunion U.S. plants.
The aerospace giant has cut over 60,000 jobs since 1993. Like other corporations worldwide, it is cutting costs in an effort to gain an edge over its competitors.
Boeing, with close to 60 percent of the world market for commercial aircraft, is the industry Goliath, far outpacing its only serious competitors, Airbus and McDonnell Douglas. But it is under pressure from Wall Street and the banks to keep driving down the cost of labor and increase productivity.
For the working class here, a job at Boeing is one of the best around. Layoffs are a fact of life, but those who keep working get wages, benefits, and conditions of work that are better than most. The IAM is a key union in the Seattle area and a defeat at Boeing would be a setback to all of us. Workers at the rally listened closely to proposals on how to win the strike and protect jobs.
Working-class solidarity needed
The answers we heard from the AFL-CIO and IAM officials
are a dead end. They set the labor movement on a course
aimed directly against what all working people need most in
today's world: working-class solidarity. Without it, we
can't fight effectively.
"Boeing seems more interested in selling airplanes than building them," IAM president Kourpias told the rally. "Of course we want Boeing to sell airplanes," he continued, "but we want to be the ones to build them."
The first observation is certainly true. Boeing would be more interested in building paper airplanes if that's how it could make the biggest profit. Boeing isn't in business to make planes. It's in business to make money.
Kourpias also remarked briefly that Chinese and Mexican workers, "are not our enemy." But he, Sweeney, Trumka, and others made it clear that good-paying jobs building airplanes should belong to U.S. workers first, last, and always.
Their speeches were laced with appeals to U.S. nationalism and references to "our" economy, "our" jobs, "our" company, and "our" country.
Union members in the United States cannot convincingly argue that workers in other countries have no right to build airplanes. Nor can we argue that such jobs must stay in the United States until workers abroad win the same wages and benefits that workers have won at Boeing or Douglas. Instead we should support the efforts of fellow workers on every continent to improve wages and conditions. Meanwhile, working people have an unfinished job fighting for union wages and conditions here.
Any "fight for jobs" based on U.S. nationalism is a fraud. We will find ourselves cut off from the only allies we have in the "global marketplace" - fellow workers in other countries.
The fundamental condition of the working class is competition. The employers buy our labor power and force us to compete among ourselves to sell it. This competition increasingly takes place on a world scale. That will be true so long as capitalism - production for profit - dominates the world market. No contract signed by any union with any employer can change that.
Unions need to overcome divisions
The purpose of unions is to overcome this division the
bosses impose on us. Workers at Boeing and Douglas, for
instance, expect their unions to cooperate in a fight
against these competing employers.
The fight for jobs can't be waged effectively - not to mention won - fac-tory by factory, industry by industry, or one contract at a time. The reality of capitalist competition in the world market is that there is no job security. The wealthy families who own these corporations will continue to cut every job they can.
We can't guarantee how many jobs there will be at Boeing or any other company over the next years. But we can mobilize the power of labor to demand that the government guarantee everyone a job at decent union wages. We can organize the labor movement and its allies to fight for a shorter workweek with no reduction in pay. A 30-hour workweek at 40 hours' pay would spread the available work around.
We can demand the government put people to work on a massive program of public works to rebuild roads, bridges, and schools; to construct housing, hospitals, mass transit systems, and other socially useful and necessary projects.
Working-class history says that the most "unrealistic" and seemingly unreachable goals were reached only after a fight was organized - often a long, hard, and difficult fight. This was true of the civil rights movement that defeated Jim Crow segregation. It's the story of the rise of the CIO in the 1930s and the subsequent organization of the "impossible-to-organize" mass production industries like auto, steel, and - aerospace.
The answer is to rely on the power of labor, and its allies like those at the strike rally, to fight for demands that reinforce solidarity among all working people the world over.
Geoff Mirelowitz is a switchman on the Burlington Northern Railroad and a member of United Transportation Union Local 845.