The military jobs program myth

By Jasmin Maurer

Yesterday was Labor Day, a day to honor working people and their contributions to society. It is also a day to honor the labor movement, and the great strides it has made and continues to make for workers’ rights.

As the United States government continues to hash out a new defense budget, the military industry has threatened that there will be layoffs if adequate funding is not appropriated to the Pentagon.

The problem here is that these threats are bullying tactics meant to scare people into supporting a system that falsely touts itself as a jobs program. Many of us have already heard some statistics, like for every $1 billion spent on military, we create only 11,200 while that same amount could support 26,700 jobs in education.

A new infographic from the Project on Government Oversight shows another side of the Pentagon job program myth. Defense companies make billions of dollars in profits. The average salary of the top Pentagon contractors is $21,500,000 a year. That’s the same as the salaries of 268 aerospace and defense workers, as the graph clearly shows.

If these are the facts, then why is it the workers who are being laid off instead of CEOs taking a pay cut? Protecting the military budget isn’t going to save anyone’s job except for those in the top one percent.

As we move beyond Labor Day and into Congress’s continued deliberation of budget cuts, military contractors are going to continue to try to fool people into thinking they know what’s best for working-class people. But in truth they are just another corporate power looking to increase their profits at any cost.