The IAM bureaucracy brutalizes the rank and file to secure the Boeing sales contract.

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Boeing workers strike in Everett, Washington.

On Monday, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) won a fire sale of the contract for striking Boeing machinists. According to IAM, 59 percent voted in favor of accepting the contract.

The deal is a pathetic betrayal. It’s essentially the same deal that workers rejected by 64 percent two weeks ago, “with an additional 3 percent in wages added and money moved between the signing bonus and 401(k),” Boeing said in a statement Sunday. The Basic Workers’ Committee (BWRFC) is calling on machinists to refuse their contract.

The proposal still falls short of workers’ demands for a 40 percent wage increase, improved safety measures, lower out-of-pocket health care costs and, most of all, restoration of the defined benefit pensions stolen from machinists in 2014.

From the beginning, IAM District 751 President John Holden and the entire IAM bureaucracy worked to pass a contract that would “save Boeing from itself” or help restore profits to the company’s shareholders after a massive safety scandal that left hundreds of people dead. Notably, Holden said Monday night that workers had “secured a victory” that would help “return this company to financial success.”

Holden dodged a question about whether Boeing would lay off 17,000 people, or 10 percent of its global workforce, politely saying “the cuts would be short-sighted.” No doubt Holden and other officials are aware of even deeper cuts Boeing is planning. In the case of new contracts in the UPS and auto industries last year, new contracts touted by the bureaucracy as major “wins” were followed within weeks by thousands of layoffs.

He also dodged a question about why IAM decided to approve this preliminary agreement after officially remaining “neutral” on the second deal. Instead, Holden said the IAM was a “democratic union” and that it was “proud of our members.”

In fact, the bureaucracy deliberately violated the clear will of the rank and file at every step. The first contract approved by the IAM provided for only a 25 percent wage increase and the elimination of the annual bonus for employees. When workers expressed outrage at the reduced offer, which they then rejected by 95 percent, the union tried to scare the workers by saying that they probably “wouldn’t get much of a strike.”

During a news conference Monday night, angry workers denounced the bureaucracy in a union Facebook live broadcast with comments such as “Rigged,” “Sold out” and “Spineless union leadership.” Many others have been removed by IAM moderators.

The result is an illegal contract created through a corrupt process. Boeing machinists endured a hunger strike while receiving wages of $250 a week from IAM. Union officials also kept the machinists isolated from their brothers and sisters at Textron Aviation and Eaton Aerospace, who marched alongside the Boeing machinists, fighting for essentially the same demands for higher wages to stem inflation, as well as needed health care and pension benefits. benefits for a secure future.

At Textron, IAM negotiated a deal that many workers called worse than the original offer that was overwhelmingly rejected in September. And at Eaton Aerospace, the company is now bringing in strikebreakers to replace striking workers.

As the BWRFC wrote on Sunday, the IAM bureaucracy “acted as errand boys for Boeing and government executives.” “They ‘negotiated’ this contract in defiance of the clear signal we sent just two weeks ago when we voted against the latest White House-sponsored deal by 64 percent.”

The new contract, like the deal workers rejected last month, was brokered by acting Labor Secretary Julie Su. The White House intervention, particularly the timing of the contract vote the day before the presidential election, was aimed at quelling growing working-class opposition that could erupt amid the political civil war that would follow Tuesday’s vote. While Trump has outlined plans to overturn results that go against him, Democrats are more fearful that it will spark a grassroots movement that would also derail plans to escalate war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The fact that the vote passed by such a narrow margin also shows how much opposition remains among the rank and file. The workers were not persuaded to support the deal, but were only threatened and blackmailed by IAM and Boeing. CEO Kelly Ortberg threatened that any further contract negotiations would only lead to “regressive” contracts and a union apparatus that would capitulate in the face of such retaliation and threats, a statement that IAM bureaucrats loyally repeated.

Workers demonstrated their enormous social power in a strike that, by some estimates, was the costliest strike of the 21st century in the United States. But since World Socialist Website From the very beginning he insisted that the only way ordinary workers could achieve their demands was through their own independent initiative.

It is impossible to put pressure on the bureaucracy from below, since it obeys not the workers, but Wall Street and the White House. Instead, workers must organize independently to undermine the authority of the apparatus and transfer power to the rank and file.

The new contract with Boeing only opens the next stage of the struggle. Once the strike ends, management will continue to cut the 17,000 jobs it has already announced worldwide and more.

Moreover, whichever government comes to power will require workers at Boeing, the largest US exporter and major defense contractor, to make “sacrifices” in the name of the supposed “national interest.” Trillions of dollars spent on war are taken from the labor of the working class.

Boeing workers must continue to fight for workers’ control by developing the Boeing Rank-and-File Committee as the organizing center of rebellion against corrupt bureaucrats, management, and both pro-war parties on Wall Street.