How Marx anticipated Boeing layoffs
By Jim McMahan
Seattle
The Boeing Co. announced 5,000 layoffs at its commercial
airplane division in Seattle on Nov. 20. This attack on the
workers here comes on top of 26,000 Boeing layoffs since Sept.
11, 2001.
The bloodletting didn't begin then, either. Boeing laid off
nearly 30,000 workers in 1999-2000 due to worker speedup and
outsourcing jobs.
Once the next round of layoffs happens, Boeing's commercial
airplane employment will have dropped from 117,000 in 1998 to
60,000 in 2003. That's nearly 60,000 workers axed with nowhere
to go in a recession economy.
Most of these layoffs are in the Seattle area, where
official unemployment has been 7 percent all year long. The job
cuts are due to a 50-percent reduction of commercial airplane
orders and production. But they are also due to Boeing's
mid-1990s merger with McDonnell Douglass and Rockwell.
The layoffs have greatly angered members of the Machinists
union. In September they voted by just short of a two-thirds
majority to strike to protest the layoffs.
"We don't have enough people working now," said Mark
Blondin, president of District 751. "I've got a lot of people
working overtime and weekends. If they'd just use a 40-hour
week, you could save jobs even at smaller production
rates."
Money for war but not for jobs?
The recession crisis people are facing across the country
and the world is the cyclical crisis of capitalist
overproduction. Too many airplanes, too much of all commodities
from clothes to computers to office buildings, are produced.
The capitalists can no longer sell them. At this point millions
are laid off.
Karl Marx said that modern capitalist society "has conjured
up such gigantic means of production and exchange, like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the power of the
nether world whom he has called up by his spells."
He further said that these commercial crises "by their
periodic return put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on trial, and each time more threateningly."
This is what is happening now.
The same day the new Boeing layoffs were announced, Congress
adjourned without enacting extended unemployment benefits.
Eight hundred thousand unemployed workers, including 50,000 in
Washington state, face losing their extended unemployment
benefits on Dec. 28 because Congress wouldn't act.
One week earlier, Congress did complete legislation giving
themselves a 3.l percent pay raise.
There is no money for jobs or social services for the
unemployed and impoverished. Why?
Because President George W. Bush is working to take $200
billion out of the national treasury for a gigantic new war
against the impoverished workers of Iraq. He's taken billions
out already.
Bush, working for the capitalists, is trying to recover the
profits that corporations are losing by grabbing up the heart
of the Arab world to exploit oil profits. And Bush and the
capitalists are trying to divert the anger of U.S. workers onto
the Iraqi people.
This is a war that many workers and students and others are
organizing to stop. But Boeing, while laying off wholesale,
stands to make death-merchant profits from a new war selling
Cruise missiles, F-18 fighter-bombers and other weapons.
Millions of layoffs, cuts in social services and the
persecution of immigrants in this country bring the war back
home to the United States. The capitalists who rule society are
sure to face massive worker anger, which is rising already from
these attacks. And as Marx said, the crisis is putting the
existence of the entire capitalist economy on trial.
Reprinted from the Dec. 12, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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