“Industry and the workers have a lot of things in common, and one of those is preserving U.S. aerospace jobs,” says Lockheed Martin spokesman Joe Stout.
This strange-bedfellows alliance evolving between defense contractors and their unions is part of an effort to fight the hundreds of billions of dollars in across-the-board defense cuts set to begin taking effect next year. The cuts were included in the Budget Control Act as a way to spur Congress to act, and they can be averted only if lawmakers agree to a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan.
“The government is making a conscious decision to avoid making a decision,” says Thomas Buffenbarger, international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. “That’s not what these people were elected to do.”
The cuts would lead to “layoffs that we didn’t see even in the depths of the 2008 recession,” he adds.
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