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 the Boeing workers, face the need to organise independent rank-and-file committees to fight the trade union apparatuses’ enforcement of corporate-government job destruction and the underlying agenda of war and austerity.
To join the WSU Rank-and-File Committee or discuss establishing rank-and-file committees at other universities, contact the committee at: rfc.wsu@gmail.com.
We are workers and students at Western Sydney University (WSU) who formed a rank-and-file committee earlier this year, initially to fight the pro-business restructuring and destruction of jobs and conditions at our university’s preparatory college.
As we have warned, the purge of staff at the WSU College has now become a template for the restructuring and elimination of thousands of jobs at universities across Australia as a direct result of funding cuts by the Labor government.
Having read about your struggle on the World Socialist Web Site, we decided to send a message of solidarity with the determined stand you and the 33,000 Boeing machinists are taking against the years of attacks on wages and working conditions.
Like you, we have formed a rank-and-file committee, totally independent of the trade unions, which are complicit in the corporate-government agenda.
We support your powerful seven-week strike and your 64 percent rejection last week of the second sellout contract proposed by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) leadership.
As the WSWS reported, the IAM’s latest contract proposal amounted to “an endorsement of a corporate dictatorship.” It not only did not make up for a decade of wage freezes, it failed to restore 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 the IAM and the Biden administration, which is relying upon the union officials to end the strike because it cuts across its support for, and arming of, the war against Russia, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its plans for wider wars against Iran and China.
The IAM leadership never wanted your strike to go ahead and refuses to use the union’s $300 million assets to aid you. The miserable $250 weekly strike pay is intended to starve you back to work.
Boeing management, which has jettisoned basic safety standards in passenger airplane manufacturing, 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 against this giant corporation’s war profits and the US war machine. The shut-down of a major military contractor shows how the working class can halt the plunge into war.
Your October 3 statement—“Boeing machinists must unite with East Coast dockworkers to defend jobs and stop world war!”— points the way forward for class-conscious workers everywhere.
Our struggles can only succeed if workers organise independently of the union bureaucracies and fight for a world where human need, not profit, is the priority.
While you face ruthless enemies in management, the IAM machine and the Biden administration, you have even more powerful friends—the American and international working class.
Like Boeing workers, we confront unions that are responsible for imposing previous government cuts and that are implementing the agenda of war and austerity, including by restructuring universities to serve the needs of war economies.
We endorse the call made by the World Socialist Web Site in its October 24 Perspective: “After rejection of sellout deal, working class must mobilize behind the Boeing strike.” The tremendous social power of the working class must be organised through building the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) as a global rebellion of the rank-and-file.
As that Perspective states: “Workers can only fulfill their aspirations if they take political power in their own hands and marshal society’s resources to greatly improve the living standards of the world’s population and end social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.”