Australian university lecturers send message of support to striking Boeing workers in US

At its meeting this week, the Western Sydney University (WSU) rank and file committee voted to send a message of support and solidarity to the Boeing workers’ rank and file committee. As the message explains, university workers and students in Australia, like Boeing workers, were faced with the need to organize independent rank-and-file committees to fight the corporate government’s coercion of union apparatuses into job cuts and the underlying agenda of war and austerity.

To join the WSU grassroots committee or to discuss establishing grassroots committees at other universities, contact the committee at: [email protected].

We are the workers and students of Western Sydney University (WSU) who formed a grassroots committee earlier this year, initially to fight pro-business restructuring and the destruction of jobs and facilities at our university’s preparatory college.

As we warned, the WSU College staff purge has now become the template for the restructuring and destruction of thousands of jobs at universities across Australia, as a direct result of Labor Government funding cuts.

After reading about your struggle on World Socialist WebsiteWe’ve decided to stand in solidarity with the strong stance you and Boeing’s 33,000 machinists have taken against decades of attacks on wages and working conditions.

Like you, we have formed a rank-and-file committee completely independent of the unions that are part of the corporate government agenda.

We support your powerful seven-week strike and your 64 percent rejection last week of the second sell-off contract proposed by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) leadership.

IAM’s latest contract offer represents “support for corporate dictatorship,” the WSWS reported. Not only did it fail to make up for a decade of wage freezes, it also failed to restore the pensions stolen from you in 2014 and would have given the company the go-ahead for 17,000 announced layoffs.

Your vote is a real blow to IAM and the Biden administration, which is hoping union officials will end the strike as it prevents it from supporting and arming the war against Russia, Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip and its plans. for broader wars against Iran and China.

IAM management never wanted your strike to continue and is refusing to use $300 million in union assets to help you. The measly $250 weekly strike is designed to make you hungry and back to work.

Boeing, which has abandoned basic safety standards in the production of passenger planes, wants you to pay for its crimes and profits.

Your stand demonstrates the potential strength of the global working class and is a real blow to the war profits of this giant corporation and the US war machine. The closure of a major defense contractor shows how the working class can stop the descent into war.

Your statement on October 3 – “Boeing machinists must unite with East Coast dockworkers to protect jobs and stop world war!” — points the way forward for class-conscious workers around the world.

Our struggle can only succeed if workers organize independently of the union bureaucracy and fight for a world in which human needs, not profits, are the priority.

While you face ruthless enemies in management, the IAM machine, and the Biden administration, you have even more powerful friends in the American and international working class.

Like Boeing workers, we stand up to unions who are responsible for previous government cuts and who are pursuing an agenda of war and austerity, including by restructuring universities to meet the needs of the war economy.

We support the call made World Socialist Website in the October 24 Perspective: “After the sell-out deal is rejected, the working class must mobilize in support of the Boeing strike.” The enormous social power of the working class must be organized through the creation of the International Workers’ Union of Rank and File Committees (IWA-RFC) as a global uprising of the rank and file.

The Perspective states: “Workers can realize their aspirations only if they take political power into their own hands and direct the resources of society to significantly improve the living standards of the world’s people and end social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.”