3,100 Connecticut Aerospace Workers Strike

Mei W.

Around 3,100 Pratt & Whitney manufacturing workers at the East Hartford and Middletown plants in Connecticut have been on strike since last Monday (5/5) after voting overwhelmingly to reject the aerospace monopoly’s “last, best and final offer.” The workers, organized under the IAM machinists’ union, last struck against Pratt & Whitney in 2001.

Striking workers are demanding job security, higher wages, and better retirement benefits from the commercial and military aircraft manufacturing subsidiary of RTX Corp. While the company calls their latest wage and retirement proposals “competitive,” workers have pointed out that the 3-4% proposed annual wage increases are counterbalanced by inflation and the increased health insurance premiums and deductibles in the new proposal—amounting to real wage cuts.

Workers told local monopoly media that their primary demand is the promise of job security as Pratt continues to fire Connecticut workers while launching their cost-cutting expansion into the anti-union South. Connecticut Republicans, commenting on the strike to monopoly media, blame high electricity costs in the state for production moving south, using the strike as an opportunity to plug shifting state monopoly capital in utilities to private monopolies through energy discounts.

In January, Pratt fired an undisclosed number of workers at the East Hartford and Middletown plants and temporarily locked out additional workers for a week in Middletown due to a “lack of work.” In the same month, Pratt announced an additional $285 million investment into a highly automated plant in Asheville, North Carolina “to meet growing demand.” The plant was built in 2022 and produces the same F135 engines as the plants in Connecticut. Last October, Pratt opened its largest military engine plant in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with more investment slated for Georgia and Florida. Pratt’s move to these states follows the general trend of manufacturing monopolies relocating operations to the South where they can cut costs and extract higher profits from non-unionized labor and lower wages.

The company has been rushing to recover profits after RTX took a $5.4 billion hit in sales in the fall of 2023 when defects with powder metal were found in Pratt’s jet engines. While their sales recovered— amounting to a 41% increase in the first quarter of this year over last year’s profits according to the union—RTX projected in April that Trump’s tariffs will lead to a decrease of $850 million in its 2025 profits, including $400 million of Pratt’s profits.

A significant portion of Pratt’s military sales comes from its F135 engine—the engine that powers Lockheed Martin’s “5^th generation” F-35 Lightning II aircraft and of which Pratt is the sole producer. Last October, an Iranian ballistic missile strike damaged an Israeli military base home to around 24 F-35s, each worth $80-100 million, and more recently, Ansarallah’s missiles have nearly hit US F-35s. This has sent US military reporters into a frenzy on the deficiencies of the F-35s and the financial risks of military actions against the anti-imperialist forces, as three “4^th generation” F-18 jets in the US imperialist arsenal have so far been casualties of the US campaign against the Yemeni people.

Image: Striking Pratt workers and IAM regional leadership walk the picket line on May 8, IAM media

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: