------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Dec. 12, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
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. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
