FORT WORTH, TEXAS, May 19 — A strike by 3,600 Lockheed Martin workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 776, is entering its third week. The workers make F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, and are striking against healthcare and pension cuts. Lockheed Martin had $17.34 billion in federal contracts in 2010, making it the largest U.S. defense contractor. The company is threatening to “implement our contingency plan” to meet their blood-soaked commitments.
The war-makers’ “last, best and final offer” would force workers to pay much higher healthcare costs and eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new hires. These two issues have been at the core of practically every union contract, public and private, for more than a decade, regardless of the employers’ financial condition.
The International’s pro-capitalist union leaders generally agree to relieve the bosses of health care costs and are campaigning either for Obamacare or single-payer coverage. This was a central part of the auto union’s bailout contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler. PLP fights to eliminate the bosses and their racist profit system altogether, with communist revolution. Then we will all contribute to — and share in — a society that exists to meet the needs of the international working class.
Workers here went on strike in 2000 and 2003 to resist concessions. A local leader said, “Every three years they want to come and take some other benefit. Everyone is sick and tired of it. These folks are prepared to be on strike for a long time.”
This strike, like the one against Caterpillar (see below) could be a sign that the class struggle is heating up. And such strikes show industrial workers’ potential power to not just fight for economic demands, but to cripple the imperialist war-makers.
If workers are won to that goal, they could paralyze the bosses’ slaughter of our sisters and brothers worldwide, in the interests of the international working class. Lockheed’s warplanes are used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caterpillar’s bulldozers demolish workers’ homes in Palestine and erect Israel’s apartheid wall.
Defeating these warmakers won’t be realized without the building of a mass communist PLP and a raging debate among millions of workers. In that debate, combined with class struggle, PL’ers can win the working class to a complete overthrow of the profit system that mires our class in exploitation and perpetual imperialist wars.