Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "A Half-Century of Struggle at Boeing." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 127-130). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, February 1990
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under tthe terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
My heart leaps up anytime workers win a strike.
And when 43,000 Boeing employees in Washington state won their 48-day walkout just before Thanksgiving last year, I felt exhilarated.
I was "made whole" again, as the courts say-because 41 years ago I was part of a wonderful and tragic Boeing strike that lost. The 1948 action, the first Boeing strike, turned out to be a six-month-long losing battle against a vast array of enemies:
The labor-hating, union-busting, scabherding, strikebreaking Boeing Airplane Co.
The labor-hating, union-busting, scabherding, strikebreaking Teamsters head, Dave Beck, who colluded with the company to raid and smash the Aero-Mechanics Union (Industrial District Lodge 751 of the International Association of Machinists).
The AFL bureaucracy, abetted by the Seattle Central Labor Council, which cheered Beck's nationwide recruitment of tinkers and stinkers.
The anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, delaying tactics by the National Labor Relations Board, and local court injunctions against mass picketing.
Press hostility.
Irritation and timidity of the International officials (who delayed granting strike sanction and doling out strike benefits until company refusal to negotiate scandalized them into it).
Nineteen forty-eight was a time of labor retreat, like the past period of the '80s. The postwar tidal wave of strikes was receding in the wake of the Mohawk Valley Formula, a blueprint for strikebashing crafted by the craftiest captains of industry and their lieutenants like President Truman and Congress.
Nonetheless, the majority of Boeing strikers bravely held out. Who couldn't stand the gaff were the union officials.
IAM paid staff weren't allowed to collect their pay during a strike. The slippery NLRB, moreover, promised that if the strike were ended, all strikers would be rehired and allowed to vote in a representational election between Machinists and Teamsters.
Terrified of Beck, the International and the Aero-Mechanics officials stampeded the demoralized unionists back to work.
Naturally, not all the strikers were permitted to return. Hundreds of the most devoted activists were barred from the gates by police; a blacklist was in full effect. I, of course, was on it.
The NLRB later let some of us back in but ruled against many for no stated reason. They demurred at calling us radicals or communists, but that was generally their dividing line between the acceptables and the pariahs.
I never did get back to Boeing, where I had been an "A" electrician heading a crew on the final assembly line producing Stratofreighters, Stratocruisers, and the B-52s that carried the atomic bomb. And Beck along with the FBI got me fired from a dozen subsequent jobs.
But we all got even in a way.
The IAM won the jurisdictional election in 1949 and Beck and his minions ignominiously departed the scene.
Weary of being spied on, pestered by FBI jerks, and suddenly cast out of jobs like a leper, I got a job driving for Yellow Cab and won full membership in the belly of beast Beck's Teamsters Local 451. When the bosses and Beck finally discovered me there six months later, they were so apoplectic that they handed me, along with my final paycheck, a refund of the hundreds of dollars I had paid in union initiation fees and dues.
They expunged me from Teamster history-no record exists that I was ever a member in good standing!
So when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers waged a popular strike and returned to work last November 22 with an improved contract, my spirits soared. I congratulate them, even though I feel that they could have stayed out longer and won a lot more, given the changes in political climate and widespread sympathy for their plight. The International this time was more militant than the local officials, and many Teamsters respected the picketlines.
I also should warn the union.
Scabs have still not been dealt with-fined, expelled, or put on probation. And recent massive layoffs--clearly retaliatory and punitive-are not being adequately protested.
Boeing management today is the same Boeing management as 41 years ago-unreconstructed foes of laboring women and men of all hues, ethnic and political. Boeing is also rife with corruption and extortion.
Beating Boeing demands tight organization, strong community outreach, full internal union democracy, and the guts and gall that stem from commitment to trade union principles.
The union makes us strong-but we must resist and change all the inner negatives that weaken the union.
It is no crime to be defeated in an unfair match; another day will dawn. It is irresponsible to follow nervous misleaders and surrender to their cynicism and expediency and super-caution.
History has a way of catching up with the villains. Our job as workers is to give history a hand.