It would have been easy to mistake the gathering on Friday, Jan. 3, for a block party. Cars and pickup trucks lined both sides of Aircraft Road. The sizzle of burgers and hot dogs on the grill formed a plume of steam in the chilled air. A throng of friends and colleagues buzzed with chatter. But this was no cookout: the hundreds of people there were machinists, gathered outside the gates of the Connecticut engine manufacturing giant Pratt & Whitney. They held protest signs, wore union gear and prosthetic pig noses, and chanted against recent furloughs.
The blue-collar hourly laborers came from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The rally was called after Pratt & Whitney’s parent company, RTX, sent out an email informing them that they would be furloughed in January and likely again in July due to what it called a “forecasted lack of work” and “supply chain gaps and lighter production.”
“ It’s an unpaid shutdown,” said Mauricio, a Pratt employee and IAM Local 700 member. Some workers told Inkstick that the company suggested the furloughed workers use sick days and vacation time to compensate for their lost income. “These days we all live check to check,” Mauricio told Inkstick.
Connecticut is the birthplace of America’s private defense industry, dating back to 1798, when cotton gin manufacturer Eli Whitney became the War Department’s first contractor with a deal to supply the army with 10,000 muskets. The small state nowadays has an outsized reliance on Pentagon spending, ranking as the third-most economically dependent state nationwide.
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Scholars at the Yale School of Management estimate that nearly 10% of the small state’s gross domestic product comes from the defense industry, with titans like RTX (via Pratt & Whitney, which makes engines for both civilian and military aircraft), General Dynamics Electric Boat, and Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky leading the pack. Following behind are more than 100 small aerospace and defense components manufacturers supporting the military-industrial supply chain.
The private defense industry used to have high union density, like when at least 69% of Lockheed’s entire workforce had union membership in 1971, and in the past was a place where blue-collar workers could establish enduring middle-class careers in manufacturing. But the January furloughs and protests came after decades of union-busting at major defense contractors, who now have union rates as low as 4%. In the meantime, a new crop of venture capital-backed defense tech startups such as Anduril and Palantir that are expected to grow under the Trump administration’s spending plans have unionization rates of zero in the United States.
In a recent blow to the Connecticut union, RTX built a new engine plant from scratch 2022 in North Carolina, a so-called “right-to-work” state where local laws impede unionization. Just this year, Pratt and Whitney announced it was expanding that plant to meet increased demand for the kind of engines it already produces in Connecticut, including both for commercial aircraft and for the F-35 fighter jet. (RTX did not respond to questions from Inkstick about why it was furloughing unionized workers in Connecticut due to “lack of work” while expanding in North Carolina.)
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You would have to be a fly on the wall of RTX’s corporate offices to get to the truth of the purported supply shocks. While RTX’s claims justifying the downsizing in Connecticut are suspect, according to Dan Grazier, Senior Fellow and Director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, supply chain issues are par for the course for a program as expansive as the F-35.
“ When you have a broader supply chain, in some senses it’s a little bit more robust,” Grazier tells Inkstick. “But it also means that there are more potential failure points as well. When you’re talking about something like the F-35 that has hundreds of thousands of parts, if there’s a disruption to the fourth link in one particular supply chain, for one particular component, that can disrupt the whole enterprise.”
Pratt & Whitney is one of countless suppliers for Lockheed’s flagship product dotting all 50 states. Even so, Pratt’s engine manufacturing operation is a microcosm of the F-35’s sprawling supply chain. One three-year, $7.5 billion Pentagon award for F135 engines boasts 65 subcontracts across more than 41 individual suppliers located in multiple U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom.
To Pratt employees, their company’s extensive reach doesn’t quite scream “lack of work” — they are keenly aware of the many ironies in the company’s claims.
“They claim [the furloughs are] due to the supply chain and not getting the parts fast enough,” said IAM Local 1746 President Howard Huestis at the January rally. “They claim they need a reduction in cost. Yet they spend a billion dollars on a casting facility in Asheville.”
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Against that backdrop, the January protest was as much about pay cuts for hourly Connecticut workers as it was about an industry that is doubling down on its long divorce from the unions that once made it a haven of economic mobility.
The “solidarity rally,” as the organizers from Local 700 and East Hartford-based Local 1746 called it, brought out a diverse crowd. Joining Connecticut’s “Fighting Machinists” were non-union, salaried Pratt employees — members of the Teamsters Union, Democratic Socialists of America activists, and elected officials. Lieutenant Governor Susan Byciewicz, Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim, and former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin also showed up.
The protest’s message was adversarial and pointed. Rally-goers held signs containing slogans such as “Locked out by corporate greed” and “We pay the price for their corporate vice.” Peppering the speeches were fiery interjections from the crowd such as “Fire the bosses!”
Local 700 President Wayne McCarthy listed IAM’s demands for 2025 contract negotiations: wage increases that account for inflation, retirement benefits (which received the most applause, a theme throughout the rally), and overall respect for the skill of the employees making components for Pratt.
“ The company is threatening to come after our pensions, and they have left a generation worth of workers with no pension at all,” said McCarthy in his speech, a reference to “two-tier” contracts that are common in the industry and mean that workers hired after a certain date no longer get a pension.
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It’s not just the blue-collar workers who are seeing their pay slashed. Also in January, Pratt announced it would lay off a small number of salaried employees throughout the company, citing a need for cost savings and efficiency. That was despite enjoying a successful quarter and year overall, with annual sales up from 2023 by 18% and operating profit up 35%, though parent company RTX had fallen short of its projected sales growth.
One Connecticut employee, who worked on the F-135 engine that powers the Lockheed Martin fighter jet and who spoke with Inkstick anonymously due to fear of legal repercussions, shared the story of the company digitally “walked [her] out” of her job.
Minutes after hearing that the layoffs had come to fruition, the remote employee found herself in a Zoom meeting with a supervisor with whom she had never interacted and a Human Resources representative who sat silently as the employee learned they were letting her go due to “cost curtailment.” In other words: She had done her job just fine, in her words, but the company needed to cut spending somewhere, and she was cuttable.
The F135 engine that she worked on is somewhat a cash cow for Pratt & Whitney. The power center of the illustrious — or infamous, depending on who you ask — Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, Pratt & Whitney rakes in billions of dollars in contracts with the U.S. and other militaries each year. In 2023, Pratt landed a $5.2 billion contract from the Pentagon to speed up production of 135 engines. Pratt also has a steady stream of contracts from foreign militaries for services not exclusive to the F135.
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In April 2024, Pratt struck a $65.8 million deal with the Royal Saudi Air Force to provide engine maintenance for its fleet of F-15 fighter jets (equipped with PW-F100 engines). Additionally, Pratt is 10 years into its contract with the Israeli Air Force to provide maintenance services to Israeli F-15I and F-16I fighters, a deal which provoked a sit-in outside of the company’s Middletown facility to protest the Israeli government’s devastating siege and bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.
Pratt was RTX’s highest-earning business unit in the fourth quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, narrowly ahead of its sister companies Collins Aerospace and Raytheon Technologies. Why, then, are Pratt employees, by way of furloughs and layoffs, bearing the brunt of RTX’s fiscal woes?
One answer lies in a multi-billion dollar manufacturing error in Pratt’s Geared Turbofan (GTF) engines, which power commercial Airbus and Embraer aircraft. In 2023, the company disclosed that it had found microscopic contaminants in the powdered metals used to produce GTF engines.
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The knock-on effects of the error included the grounding of hundreds of aircraft across the world to perform inspections. The company estimated that the manufacturing error would ground an average of 350 planes annually through 2026 and cost some $3 billion. The error affected major American airline companies including Delta, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier Airlines, and Hawaiian Airlines. IndiGo, the largest commercial airline in India, blamed Pratt for its 2023 bankruptcy claim.
The financial blow of the “powder metal matter,” as RTX described it in their first quarter earnings call, appears to have landed on the shoulders of Pratt workers. The white-collar Pratt employee says that after 2023, “cost curtailment” became a buzzword at Pratt & Whitney, one it used to justify the January layoffs.
“Everything is cost curtailment,” said the employee. “Oh, we can’t have a Christmas party because of cost curtailment. We can’t have pizza for celebrating something because [of] cost curtailment. Everything and anything was cost curtailment. … And that mainly started with the powder [metal] situation.”
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The employee told Inkstick that her severance package would cover her expenses for a while because the payout tracks how many years a person worked at the company, but that a laid-off coworker at Pratt & Whitney for three years needed to find a new job in a matter of weeks in order to keep paying the bills. The noncompete agreement she and her coworkers had to sign has kneecapped them in their search for new work.
“Most people work paycheck to paycheck. That’s just the way it is,” she said. “If you don’t have three months [to] save up, to pay all your bills, you’re screwed,” she continued. “I’m a person that I don’t have three months saved up in my savings account.”
The employee ended her recollection of her time at the company with a question for its president, Shane Eddy.
“ What do you want to be remembered by to the employees of this company once you leave?” she asked. “Don’t think about what you’ve done for Wall Street.” She went on: “Don’t think of what you’ve done for the investors of Pratt Whitney. Don’t think about what you’ve done for the Board of Directors, but please, tell me: What do you think you have done and you’re going to be remembered by the actual employees of this company?”
