SANTA SUSANA, California: Community coalition protests 2013 Boeing dump of contaminated “low-level radioactive” debris from its Santa Susana Field Lab to landfills and construction material recycling centers and unlicensed waste sites. Most went to Black and Latinx workers’ neighborhoods.
Fighting for Communism is a Life and Death Issue for Workers, Our Children, and their Children’s Children
SEATTLE (US), November 13—Boeing makes billion$ producing weapons systems that slaughter workers all around the world. It is less well known that these profits are built on a foundation that necessitates poisoning tens of thousands of the company’s employees.
Three families of Boeing employees have sued the company. The parents’ exposure to toxic chemicals in the factories caused birth defects in their children. One child has a life-long heart condition, another a neurological disorder resulting from a missing part of her brain, and a third a debilitating genetic disorder.
According to more than 100 depositions and internal company documents, Boeing’s top doctors estimated that 30,000 employees were exposed to “toxic chemical mixtures.” Fifteen hundred would suffer “outbreaks of serious illness—including sterility, fetal abnormalities, stillbirth, lifelong chronic illness, cancer and death.”
C., a retired Boeing worker, described how his crew washed their hands with toxic solvents, breathed in lead dust that saturated the hammer shop, and ate their lunch next to acidic tanks. The factory was evacuated several times when toxic fumes spread throughout the building.
The company considered demolishing the building. Boeing headquarters squashed the idea. It would cost too much to clean up the polluted ground under the factory.
“We’re lucky to be alive!” C. told another comrade who also worked on the factory floor.
On March 18, 1980, Boeing’s doctors tried to warn company leadership about the fatal potential of toxic chemicals. One doctor noted that CEO Stamper “did not appear at all sympathetic” about having this brought to his attention.
Chemicals identified in the lawsuits, like Chromium VI, are still used in the Everett Boeing plant. Chromium VI contaminated the groundwater in Hinkley, California, as dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.”
Communists Organize Factory Struggle
Around the time the doctors were warning the company, Boeing workers launched a campaign against poisonous gas exposure in the Auburn (Washington) plant. Auburn workers focused on the degreaser methyl chloroform (TCE), a derivative of a poison gas used during World War I.
In 1979, a pregnant employee asked a Boeing doctor about the risk. “There is no sure way of protecting ourselves from TCE fumes,” he replied.
The company started a “safety” program that punished injured employees with letters of reprimand. Auburn employees responded by posting a cartoon depicting a worker kicking the safety supervisor into the degreaser vat and saying, “Take your letter and soak it in methyl chloroform.”
Leaflets distributed throughout the plants emphasized that the workers could not expect anything better from a company that “supported genocidal fascism in South Africa where 50% of the children under the age of 5 die.” The leaflets invited Boeing workers to communist May Day events and insisted that the union include demands to end the poisoning in the plants.
The poisoning continues forty years later. In 2021, Boeing toxicologists reviewed more than 100 chemical information sheets. Decades after scientific literature documented the link between birth defects and organic solvents, the company added a single line to the TCE information sheet: “May be toxic to reproduction.”
Capitalism Is Poison; Communism Is the Antidote
Workers who are now ICWP comrades helped lead the Auburn campaign. We have learned from our mistakes. No matter how widespread or militant the effort to reform capitalism, we can’t let reform be a substitute for mobilizing the masses for communism.
“No company can end the poisoning,” comrade C. commented. “Capitalism is based on lies and exploitation. If Boeing spent the money needed to protect our health, other companies would take over. That is what history teaches us.
“This system is a joke,” he concluded. “We must end it!”
Only communist revolution can end the poisoning because communist collective production eliminates the profit system. Without money, profits and corporations, communism will organize production for our collective needs.
In communism, the ICWP will mobilize masses to study the science so we can judge what is safe and what is not. We will not be at the mercy of capitalist regulators who weigh profits and costs above human life. The international working class will guarantee our safety, the health of our children and their children’s children.
But to get there we need to build the ICWP and expand our communist base.
At a recent potluck, friends and comrades were angry and frustrated when they heard what was going on at Boeing. We will be working with them to organize discussions with more friends about this issue and communism. We will revitalize the distribution of Red Flag at Boeing in the new year and encourage our Red Flag readers there to discuss this on the plant floor.
Capitalism kills in peacetime and war, with toxic chemicals and military weapons. The international working class must have one goal and one goal only: to end this murderous system with communist revolution.
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