The following statement was released Sept. 17 by Rachele Fruit, a member of UNITE HERE and Socialist Workers Party candidate for president.
The war between labor and capital is the central issue of the 2024 presidential election campaign. In the past two years working people have been forced to spend more and more of their income on food. We can’t afford to live in the cities where we work. Hours and working conditions make it hard to live any sort of life outside of the job and all too often threaten our health and our lives.
The exploiters are conscious of their class interests and united against the workers. Now growing numbers of workers are saying, “Enough is enough! It’s time we stand up for ourselves.” I have heard this on picket lines across the country, from hotel and bakery workers, flight attendants and many more.
The machinists at Boeing voted down their proposed contract by 94.6% and to strike by 96% Sept. 12. After 16 years of no wage increases, and forced concessions on retirement and health care, a 25% raise over four years was not going to cut it. The starting pay for some new hires is little more than minimum wage in Washington state. Senior workers who gave up their retirement pension 10 years ago want it back. One worker told KING5 news, “We’re just out here taking care of each other.”
Nonunion Boeing workers in South Carolina should not be seen as competition. Bring them into the ranks of organized labor!
The men and women of the International Longshoremen’s Association from Maine to Texas, 45,000 strong, are preparing to walk off the job in a few days to join Boeing workers on the picket line. They’re determined to win a contract that protects their wages and jobs. “It will be hard, but we have to strike,” one worker told me at the ILA hiring hall in Miami this week. “It’s been a long time coming!”
The United States Maritime Alliance is automating workers out of a job and counting on the bosses’ government to invoke anti-labor legislation and force the workers back to work. Democratic President Joseph Biden did exactly that two years ago when he vetoed the right to strike of 115,000 freight rail workers.
When the trains, ports and factories come to a halt and the bosses start losing millions every day, you see the power of the working class and our potential to galvanize other workers in solidarity.
Attacks on constitutional freedoms — including the right to strike — are under attack by the Democrats as well as the Republicans. They say that striking workers hurt “our economy,” while the bosses push to boost their profits at our expense and weaken our unions. There is no such thing as “our” economy — there are two sharply counterposed class interests between the bosses and workers.
The bosses’ profit drive is deadly. Boeing agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge related to the 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people. In its June 25 final hearing on the February 2023 Norfolk Southern toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the National Transportation Safety Board had to admit the rail bosses bear full responsibility. They said the company’s conduct was “unprecedented and reprehensible.”
The entire working class must support the Boeing strikers. Their fight is our fight.
As conditions of life for the working class deteriorate, and the rulers’ wars escalate, millions of workers are being drawn into politics in a new and urgent way, looking for ways to fight and win. That’s why more workers today are organizing unions and using their unions to fight for higher pay and cost-of-living protection.
All strike battles today are political struggles. We need to break with the bosses’ parties, the dead-end road of “lesser-evilism.” It’s time for us to organize our own political party, a party of labor, a party to unite our class to defend our own class interests today on the road to taking political power into our own hands.