Fruit joins Boeing picket, builds support for strike
SEATTLE — “We’re out here, not for me, but for my son” and other younger hires, Tom Brown, a striking Boeing worker told Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, when she walked the picket line Oct. 5 at the company’s plant in Everett. She was accompanied by campaign supporter Roger Bland, another striker.
“We’re fighting for better wages, benefits, to get our pension back,” Brown said.
Ken Longanecker, who has been working there since 1997, explained to Fruit how workers lost their pension. “Our pension was frozen as of 2014,” he said.
“So, if you worked there seven years by 2014 and then kept working there it’s as if you only worked there seven years?” Fruit asked.
“Yes,” Brown said.
Fruit described the reaction of working people she’s met on the campaign trail. “There’s tremendous support for your strike.” She explained how workers’ attitudes have shifted and they’re looking for ways to fight today. She said she had the opportunity to talk with longshore workers at East Coast ports, with Amazon workers fighting for a union in the U.K., with workers at International Flavors and Fragrances in Tennessee and more.
Along with building solidarity with today’s union struggles, “the SWP takes up key political and international questions of deep interest to working people. My campaign defends Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews.”
“Absolutely,” Longanecker replied.
“Jewish people have been persecuted forever,” Kate McKinney, a structural mechanic at the plant, told the SWP candidate. McKinney pointed to attacks on Jewish students on U.S. campuses. “It kills me to see this happening,” she said.
Campaign rally
The fight against Jew-hatred was one of the central political questions Fruit addressed at an Oct. 5 rally here. She pointed to the SWP’s continuity with V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who led the 1917 Russian Revolution and brought an end to pogroms that reactionary forces there had repeatedly carried out.
“The Holocaust took place because Washington and other imperialist democracies cared nothing for Jews and closed their borders to them, and because of the betrayals of workers’ revolutions by the Stalinists that led to Hitler’s rise to power. That’s why Israel had to be and why it has to be today.
“As we campaign, we explain that Jew-hatred — a reflection of the crisis of capitalism — is a life-and-death question for the working class. We have to act against every move to slander, scapegoat and attack Jews.”
She pointed to the book, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class, saying, “It’s a great aid in making the history of this fight known to a wider audience.”
The U.S. government’s goal is to defend its own imperialist interests in the region, Fruit said. “It wants an end to Israel’s war to eliminate Hamas. It wants more stability in its relations with the Iranian regime. Fighting Jew-hatred is not the U.S. rulers’ concern and never has been.
“Hezbollah is the Iranian rulers’ most powerful proxy, with reportedly 150,000 missiles,” Fruit said. “Its top leadership is gone, but the organization is not destroyed. Israel is trying to degrade Hezbollah further.
“The showdown between Israel and the Iranian rulers is not only coming. It’s virtually here. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. that Israel will do what it has to do to prevent them from gaining a nuclear weapon. Tehran wants it for one main reason — the annihilation of Israel. We must be prepared for what Israel has to do to prevent this.
“Don’t be confused by what Washington is calling Israel’s ‘escalation,’” she said. “Every time Israel takes action to defend itself, it’s not just for themselves.
“Over the last six years, hundreds of thousands of Iranian working people have repeatedly expressed their disapproval of the repressive policies and expansionist anti-Israel course of the government,” Fruit said.
“The most important obstacle to the course of the regime in Iran is the country’s working people. They have protested in massive numbers in cities, villages and rural areas in 2018, 2019 and 2022. In defiance of the regime today there are strikes by oil contract workers and nurses. She pointed to a statement by the Coordinating Council of Nurses’ Protests: “Stop Warmongering, Think About Us!”
“The class struggle in Iran is central to overcoming the national divisions and uniting the toilers of the Middle East,” Fruit said.
“We are for Israel’s defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah and of Iran’s nuclear capability. These confrontations reflect the weaknesses and breakdowns of the imperialist order and the danger of spreading wars, including the use of nuclear weapons.”
The only way to prevent that from becoming a reality, Fruit said, is by working people organizing in our millions to take political power into our own hands, in the Middle East, in the U.S. and worldwide.
