BAE Systems’ war complicity is shared by Unite the union

Workers at BAE Systems have won a major pay rise. Their union Unite celebrated the win in a press release which made little mention of the firm’s role in accelerating global war and genocide. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said:

It has taken a courageous stance from our workers on a picket line to win this award. They should be congratulated for standing together and winning a pay rise they truly deserve.

This has been a hard-fought victory against an employer that tried every trick in the book to avoid paying our members what they deserved.

This win shows the power in a union and that when our reps and workers across the aerospace industry and across Lancashire stand together they can win against even the biggest employers.

As one would expect, the Unite press release made no mention of BAE’s role in an arms trade which fuels violence, displacement and climate damage across the planet.

BAE Systems are warmongers

This kind of contradiction characterises big unions like Unite. They’re very conservative organisations in many ways and often see their remit as ending with getting their members better conditions

Not all members agree…

finally agreed to take a stand against the production of arms for Israel.

union staff not to support campaigns against arms factories.

She even claimed:

there is no contradiction for a trade union to hold a position of solidarity with Palestinian workers, while at the same time refusing to support campaigns that target our members’ workplaces without their support.

Clearly this is a completely inadequate response to a genocide. Yet workers have devised ways to address runaway militarism before. For example, the Lucas Plan.

Developed in the 80s at Lucas Aerospace, a major UK ‘defence’ firm, the plan proposed all kinds of radical changes to industry:

The impetus for the Lucas Plan came from the Lucas Aerospace workers who faced losing their jobs, and wanting to produce socially useful products rather than weapons.

And:

the Plan was extremely influential in the disarmament movement, since it showed that, with political will and support, disarmament did not have to mean thousands of workers losing their jobs.

What was lacking then, is still lacking now. Real change would need a government resilient enough to the arms lobby to implement so-called ‘defence diversification’. This would re-organise workers away from the business of killing and into socially useful and meaningful tasks. The fact remains thought that at the moment, that sort of government seems very hard to imagine.

Featured image via the Canary