#and neither should your organizing be bound! hang together or hang separately you absolute fools

[chamerionwrites]

While these protests succeeded in disrupting normal operations at the targeted arms companies, they were unable to meaningfully halt the manufacture of weapons, in part because the group best poised to shut down production was conspicuously absent from each of the actions: the companies’ workers. More than two million US workers are employed by the weapons industry, which produces over 80% of all of Israel’s arms imports, including “precision guided munitions, small diameter bombs, artillery, ammunition, Iron Dome interceptors and other critical equipment,” according to the Pentagon, as well as F-35 aircraft—the most advanced fighter jets in the world. In the past month and a half, Israel has used these weapons in a genocidal assault that has killed more than 14,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, at least 5,600 of them children. The violence has prompted direct action against the Israeli war machine’s supply chain, with protesters targeting not only munitions factories but also ships transporting arms to Israel and financial firms with significant investments in the weapons industry. But unlike in many other parts of the world, where weapons workers have led the disruption in response to an urgent call for solidarity from Palestinian trade unions, in the US, unions in the weapons industry have so far remained outside the fray.

This is despite the presence of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of unionized workers in the US weapons industry, some of whom are employed at the very factories that protesters have attempted to shut down this fall. As journalist Taylor Barnes reported earlier this year, each of the five major Pentagon contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics—employs some unionized workers, although union density at the firms ranges from as low as 4% at Northrop Grumman to as high as 32% at Boeing. Many of these unionized workers belong either to the International Association of Machinists (IAM), or to the United Auto Workers (UAW), which is part of a renaissance in the US labor movement. Both unions include employees at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics; the IAM additionally represents workers at Northrop Grumman and M7 Aerospace, a wholly owned subsidiary of the infamous Elbit Systems, while the UAW represents workers at Woodward, Inc., an aerospace firm that gained unwanted attention last month after a viral photo from the ruins of Gaza appeared to show a used missile component with the company’s logo on it. The unions are also actively organizing more workers in the weapons industry: Just last month, for example, the IAM unionized 332 Lockheed employees in Kentucky.

For anti-war labor organizers in the United States, unionized weapons workers present a paradox: Serving such members ostensibly requires making weapons industry jobs stable and remunerative, but the principles of global solidarity call for dismantling the war machine altogether. Traditionally, US unions have only pursued the former mandate. As one anonymous local union president in the industry put it to researcher Karen Bell earlier this year, “my top priority is trying to make sure that we have work in jobs in the United States . . . I don’t make a lot of judgments on anything other than, what can you do to keep the people I represent in work? That’s my job, and to be anything other than that, it would really be a disservice to the people that are paying my salary.” Rather than questioning their role in the industry, unions have reconfirmed their relationships with weapons companies since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Last month, 1,000 IAM members in Arizona and 1,100 UAW members across the Midwest separately ratified new contracts with Raytheon and General Dynamics respectively, during a period when both companies were actively implicated in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. When the Raytheon contract deal was announced on October 22nd, one IAM leader said he was “proud to support our Raytheon members and excited for this contract’s positive impact on their lives”—a statement that highlights the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the economic interests of weapons industry workers and the anti-war, anti-genocide movement.