Tick Tock, Triumph: The War Machine's Machinists in West Hartford Vote for Strike Action

The vote was 148 to 1. When the second day of a two-day strike authorization ballot closed on Friday, October 24, at UAW Local 405 in West Hartford, Connecticut, 86 percent of the local had turned out, and 99 percent of them had voted to give the union permission to strike — any time after the current contract expires at midnight on October 31.

The number is small in one way and enormous in another. Small: 174 workers at a single plant. Enormous: these are the machinists, assemblers, and technicians at Triumph Group's integrated systems site who produce, repair, and overhaul engine controls and other components for U.S. military aircraft. The workers who keep the war machine running have, for the moment, voted that the machine may be stopped.

The ledger

The fight is about money, and the union has put its arithmetic on the table in public. According to the UAW, the average wage at the West Hartford plant is $39.34 an hour with no cost-of-living adjustment to protect workers from five years of inflation; new hires start at $25.25. The union's aerospace sister locals have done better: UAW members at Rolls-Royce make $43.70 an hour in production and assembly, and UAW members at GE Aerospace make $43.79 — and both contracts carry cost-of-living protection.

The other column of the ledger belongs to the company. In its release on the vote, the union said Triumph Group made $680 million in profit during the life of the last contract — $687 million, by the union's five-year count — and that the company's CEO was paid $31.7 million over that same stretch, $61.6 million in the last decade. Those are the union's figures, and they are the arithmetic that makes the "we can't afford it" line of collective bargaining sound like a lie.

"Our members in West Hartford are no different than UAW aerospace workers across the country. Triumph can afford to do better and this vote is a sign that they must put a better offer forward," said Brandon Mancilla, director of UAW Region 9A, the region that represents the local.

The stalling

October at the bargaining table reads like a study in how a company tries to make the clock run out on the other side. The local says it delivered a full economic proposal on October 16 — two weeks before expiration — and says the company produced no economic counterproposal until October 23, eight days before the contract dies. On October 20, the local's daily updates report, Triumph disclosed for the first time that it intended to "overhaul" the workers' health plan, gave no details, and conditioned its economic proposal on the union offering a healthcare proposal first.

When the offer finally came, it was, in the local's words, a retreat: wage increases below the last contract, with no dollar-amount increase; tighter overtime rules, including no Sunday overtime unless Saturday overtime was worked, no overtime past eight hours on a weekday, and nothing until 40 hours were worked; triple-time holiday pay only if a worker accepted every offered hour; and the removal of the plant's in-house eye doctor and a flat, non-rolling safety-shoe allowance. What was not in the offer, per the local: job security, cost-of-living protection, profit sharing, help with healthcare costs, or added holidays — Veterans Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth. "Other UAW aerospace contracts have all of these."

The local did not sit still. According to the bargaining committee, roughly 90 percent of members signed strike pledges in a single day. Workers wore red on Wednesday, October 21. And when the ballot went out, the committee's message was blunt: this is the most important vote in the local's history.

"It was just hours before our strike vote that the company finally gave us an economic proposal – 8 days before our contract expiration. Frankly, the company is still not taking our membership seriously," said Benjamin Wilcox, president of Local 405. "Here's hoping the results of this strike vote helps convince them just how different we are doing things this year."

What 99 percent means

A strike authorization is not a strike. It is permission — a floor under the local's next move. The contract expires at midnight on October 31, and from that moment, if talks resume on Monday without a deal, 174 machinists can walk out whenever the union calls it. That is the leverage the vote was really about: the credible threat that the components keeping the military's aircraft flying stop moving.

That threat lands somewhere unusual in American politics. The workers of the defense industrial complex are usually the quiet ones — union members in a plant where the product is not a phone or a car but the components of national power, and where a strike is harder for some to excuse than a walkout at an auto plant. That this local is willing to publicize the profit its labor generates, to benchmark its wages against its aerospace sisters, and to sign strike pledges in a single day is a statement as much as a vote: the people who build the machine do not owe it their gratitude.

The union calls itself the reasonable side in this negotiation, and the ledger it has published is a reasonable ledger. One no vote. 148 yeses. And a week to close the gap before the war machine's machinists decide the company's best offer is a picket line.