Meet the Retired Defense Contractor Pushing Green Jobs at the Machinists
A retiree from a military contractor in Connecticut spent years lobbying his union to focus on climate change and green jobs. In September, the Machinists enthusiastically endorsed his vision.
Hi everyone,
If you closely follow my work (and it’s ok if not!) or that of Inkstick friend Miriam Pemberton, author of “Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies,” you’ll probably know the name John Harrity.
He’s a retiree from Pratt & Whitney, which makes engines for military and civilian aircraft. Harrity told me that as a young man he had sought a job at Pratt in Connecticut because he wanted to be a part of the labor movement, joining as a vertical turret lathe operator in 1979, a time when the company, he said, was “hiring by the busload.” But in the decades since, Pratt & Whitney, nowadays a division of RTX (Raytheon), had fractured his local Machinists union’s strength by moving jobs to conservative states in the South and automating manufacturing processes that slashed the number of blue-collar humans the company needed to employ.
Harrity began reading up on climate change about a decade ago, and he came to believe that it was the most serious threat to human existence across the globe. He feared that organized labor was a “conservative, stodgy organization at the back of the pack” on pressing social issues. “I didn't want the labor movement and especially our union to drag behind on such an important issue as this,” he said.
In September, his years of lobbying his 600,000-strong union came to a fore: At the Machinists’ national convention, both leadership and delegates enthusiastically endorsed a climate safety resolution that endorsed “just transition” — the notion that workers in times of economic upheaval should not be abandoned but instead financially supported, integrated, and redeployed in new industries. The union also published and endorsed an extensive report commissioned from Climate Jobs Institute at Cornell University, which provides an x-ray of the union’s membership and how climate change will disrupt many of the Machinists’ industries.
If you care about, to borrow Miriam’s phrase, warfare economies, why do the inner workings of the Machinists union matter? The IAM is the largest union at defense contractors, though the sector makes up about just 10% of its membership as a whole, and the 1.1 million workers of the private defense industry are largely not unionized. While union strength has steadily dwindled at top military contractors like General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, where a mere 4% of the workforce is represented by a collective bargaining agreement, the Machinists have in recent years grown in other sectors, like healthcare, semiconductor manufacturing, wildland firefighters and clean energy, including organizing campaigns underway at Lion Electric, which makes electric school buses and trucks, in Illinois and Quebec.
Read more about Harrity’s many years of lobbying the IAM and how the tide has turned in our latest at Inkstick Media.
And for those of you who have been around long enough to remember the IAM labor visionary William Winpisinger, read ‘til the end to learn about how the “seat-of-the-pants socialist” gets a nod in the latest union’s climate safety push.
Thank you for reading!
Thoughts, comments, story suggestions? Send them my way at tbarnes@inkstickmedia.com. We may publish them in a future newsletter.
PS — We got some terrific applications for our corps of field reporters for the military-industrial complex. Stay tuned for updates about our fellows!