https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/27/lockheed-martin-strike-orlando-weapons-missiles-00514386?ceid=296116&emci=d03704a3-37b4-f011-8e61-6045bded8ba4&emdi=80e8776f-b6b4-f011-8e61-6045bded8ba4
*Lockheed Martin, like other contractors, has suffered a wave of retirements over the last decade as the skilled workforce it built up during the Cold War aged out into retirement, draining the best-trained and most experienced employees. *
Unlike his elders, Spence doesn’t have a pension, he has to pay for more of his health insurance out of pocket, and his pay raises have fallen far behind the rising cost of rent, auto insurance and grocery bills. Spence lives about an hour away from the factory because he can’t afford a place in Orlando.
Masters said in 2022 that many of his employees could barely afford apartments in the Orlando area, and one of his new hires was sleeping in her car. That year, an entry-level employee at the factory earned a minimum of $15.45 an hour, which was less than some service-sector jobs in the area. In 2025, a local Buc-ee’s gas station advertised wages for “restroom crews” starting at $20 an hour and car wash employees at $21 an hour.
Shoot that isn’t much better than WalMart wages.
Acara found that annual turnover in the defense and aerospace industry hit 13 percent in 2023, compared to an average U.S. rate of 3.8 percent. And this is happening just as the need for those skills is rising. Demand for advanced manufacturing skills in the sector is outpacing the number of trained employees, and 75 percent of defense companies are struggling to find qualified employees, the survey found.
Meanwhile:
During the 2000s, the big defense contractors worked relentlessly to expand their profit margins, make their production lines as lean as possible and boost their annual sales. Raytheon’s stock price nearly quintupled from 2001 to 2021 while Northrop Grumman’s rose nearly 700 percent. Lockheed Martin did exceptionally well between 2001 and 2022, when the company’s stock price rose more than tenfold from $34.68 to $389.13 a share. The profitability came, in part, because Lockheed was focused on keeping labor costs low and supply lines trim.
Instead of hiring more workers and paying workers more in an effort to retain them, these companies are far more focused on meeting the demands of Wall Street, trying to entice investors and boost their stock price by cutting costs, as well as using billions of dollars in revenue to pay handsome dividends and buy back shares of stock. Last year, for example, Lockheed Martin gave $6.8 billion in buybacks and dividends directly to its shareholders, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of the company’s total revenue and was larger than the $5.3 billion it kept in profits. The same year, RTX (formerly called Raytheon) paid $3.7 billion to shareholders, General Dynamics paid $3 billion and Northrop Grumman paid $3.7 billion. The billions of dollars they send back shareholders each year means that there is less money to go toward paying, hiring or retaining their employees.
Hey the Shareholder’s own the company. And they approve Ceo compensation & bonuses.
Shareholder Value!
