The Seattle City Council’s newest councilwoman-elect, Kshama Sawant, went to a rally being held by the Boeing Machinist’s (who just turned down a decent contract proposal from the company), where she called Boeing’s thoughts on moving the 777X production line out of state because of the union’s frequent labor disruptions “economic terrorism”.
She proposed that if Boeing does decide to move production out of state, that the machinists should squat the current production facility and take it over.
“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do,â€
She neglects to think about the engineers who design the planes and the rest of the company infrastructure that sells the planes. But hey, she’s a Socialist. She wouldn’t know how a company works.
“We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,â€
When she says “war machines” she is referring to the drones that none of these workers build. But hey, she’s a Socialist. A plane is a plane, right?
And a mass transit bus is just like a plane too. It carries people from Point A to the rest of the alphabet, except it doesn’t have wings, right? I am sure that Boeing is already tooled to build heavy duty diesel engines, right?
She’s a Socialist. What difference does it make?
I have a feeling that this woman is going to lend herself frequently to RNS Quote of the Day post.
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Do any of the workers she loves know how to pay the worker’s salaries? Do any of these workers know how to pay the corporate taxes Boeing pays which pay this socialist cyst’s salary? I’m gonna say no.
Boeing should truck the machines in to some Seattle warehouse and let Sawant’s supporters have at it. THey’ll discover without management, there’s no access to capital to retool airplane building equipment to bus making, no capital to run the machines or buy the raw materials, no capital to pay their salaries? And where’s the know-how to re-tool those machines, to retrain workers who build jets to build buses, the know-how and skills to run Sawant’s Bus-Building Co-Op and sell their products to a willing market? Probably not amongst a bunch of machinists. But it’s all the same to socialists. A worker is a worker; “you build planes, so you can build a bus, right?” Hey, a bricklayers and surgeons both work with their hands, but I ain’t trusting the mason from Acme to remove my appendix. And socialists agitate against management, trying to get the workers to rise up and oust management, because the socialist agitators think they can become the new management over the workers. But alas, the new boss will not be the same as the old boss, because as much as socialists rant against capitalism and corporations, they don’t know how it works.
The Stupid! It burns!
Knowing that Seattle elected this communist scrunt makes me feel even better about my decision to move away years ago. I can’t wait to see the effects of her “wise leadership” in a few years. “Hey, why don’t we have any jobs? I need another toke, man.”
Ms. Sawant is an idiot for a number of reasons, as has been pointed out previously. I do feel constrained to point out a couple of things however. (Disclosure: I am an employee at the Lazy B although I am not a member of the IAM.) The rally at which she spoke was organized by the WSLC, “in support of the IAM,” not organized by the Machinists.
As for the contract proposal, which was billed as an 8-year extension but was really just a new contract that is considerably worse than the one they negotiated two years ago, well… the IAM chose to join a national union and they got screwed – the local union didn’t even know about the negotiations. The general tenor of the Machinists I talked with was why would they vote for a contract they hadn’t had a single iota of input into? Most of them were more angry at the union than they were at Boeing – or at least equally so. The union, by the way, recommended they accept the extension, but they did not, as Phil said.
The relationship between Boeing and the IAM is weird. IAM often strikes when Boeing NEEDS them to strike. A number of years back, the strike allowed Boeing the fig leaf to save face when a supplier dropped the ball on a number of assemblies that prevented on-time delivery of airplanes. Lo and behold, the strike lasted just long enough for the supplier to fix their problems and deliver the assemblies, and Boeing got to blame the delivery delays on the union.
About five years ago, the 787 program dropped into the pot when Boeing realized that their distributed supply chain was simply incapable of producing parts of sufficient quality and in sufficient quantity to make production targets. Boeing leaned hard on the Puget Sound region in particular to save the program from collapse. The South Carolina plant, according to several news articles I have seen, hasn’t been producing as much as Boeing would like. I think the IAM members expect that wherever the 777X work gets sent, a good bit of it will wind up back here with the request “Please fix it.” Time will tell.