Goldy deflects some of the flack coming at Kshama Sawant for suggesting the Boeing workers take over production, and start producing things that aren’t used for war. The piece is fine as far as it goes, but I think he misses the biggest problem with this kind of dismissive commentary: it doesn’t give us any idea of what a takeover might look like.
Now I have certainly no idea what a worker takeover at Boeing by its workers might look like. The best guess off the top of my head is something like Mondragon. Or maybe she has something completely else in mind; Mondragon isn’t a panacea. And in any event how the state, or others, might move from Boeing making unreasonable demands to whatever she’s pushing wasn’t discussed. It was a short speech at a rally, and there’s only so much nuance you can give. So there are more questions than answers.
But, gosh, the best people to get those answers are reporters. Rather than writing dismissive pieces, they could ask her for details. I mean they could eventually get to dismissive if that’s their position, but it would be nice to know what she’s actually proposing and how she expects to get from point A to point B before dismissing it.
Now to be clear, I don’t think I agree with her (again, to the point that I understand what she’s proposing). The best thing is probably for Boeing to realize that they need the Puget Sound workforce. But if that doesn’t happen, and Boeing continues the slow decline of their Western Washington workforce, there will be people in the region with manufacturing skills, and no job. It might make more sense for them to start something collective rather than hope that some other big company will come to the rescue, and if this discussion makes them realize that there are other options, well, I’d rather not have pundits — especially ostensibly lefty ones — shutting that discussion down.
