Defense Workers: Battle of Conscience in Plants : Some See Inconsistency Between Personal Beliefs, Making Military Weapons
By day, mathematician John Honigsfeld works on the Strategic Defense Initiative, part of Los Angeles County’s $15.4 billion military contracting industry, one of the major forces driving the local economy.
Nights and weekends, citizen John Honigsfeld demonstrates against American militarism, including the Star Wars project that employs him.
“I continue working there mainly for economic reasons. The best paying jobs in my field are in military contracting,” Honigsfeld, a one-time cabbie and a former schoolteacher, says when asked why a man of his views works for Hughes Electro-Optical and Data Systems Group, part of General Motors growing weapons business. “I make $43,000 a year. I couldn’t make anywhere close to that anywhere else.”
Honigsfeld, 45, said some of his friends in the radical, leftist ‘60s-inspired Peace and Freedom Party think he has compromised. The security clearance bureaucracy is so unsure of what to make of his activities, he added, that once it asked if he wanted to give up his security clearance.
True-Blue American
But Honigsfeld thinks his actions are, well, true-blue American.
“In America, we’re supposed to be free,” Honigsfeld said. “In a democracy, dissent is not disloyalty” and thus to him it seems not at all odd that he works on a government-funded project that he agitates against in his free time.
The Pentagon estimates that 3.3 million Americans have defense-related jobs. Honigsfeld is perhaps the most unusual among a tiny number of these workers whose conscience has moved them to challenge militarism in U.S. foreign policy.
Some with similar ethical qualms, like Tom Machado of Westchester and Robin Podolsky of Echo Park, quit jobs in Southern California defense plants.
And interviews with other defense plant workers, selected by their companies, indicate they believe their work is more than just a job and is vital to maintaining freedom.
Ron Hamilton of Lennox and Bill Carpenter of Simi Valley, for example, feel strongly about applying their skills to create the best defense possible to discourage warfare while Harold Shapiro of Yorba Linda also see peacetime technological benefits in preparation for war.
A spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Assn., a trade group, said it believes so few people have left military work as a matter of conscience that the industry has not studied the issue and is unaware of any review of the matter by other segments of the defense plant industries. A Pentagon spokesman said the Department of Defense knows of no studies of the phenomena.
However, Jonathan Parfrey of the lay religious organization Orange County Catholic Worker in Santa Ana and a coordinator for Aerospace Engineers/Workers for Social Responsibility, a small 3-year-old local group that opposes militarism in U.S. foreign policy, said during that the past three years he has talked to about 70 people in Southern California who have quit military contracting work for ethical reasons.
Similar organizations in Puget Sound, Kentucky, Boston and Washington, D.C., have also identified small numbers of defense plant workers who announced they were quitting as an act of conscience.
Silent Protesters
Parfrey estimates that between 1% and 5% of those who quit defense plant jobs are “silent protesters,” who develop qualms about the moral justification of their work and then quit or retire early without declaring their views to their employers or co-workers.
Robert M. Nelson, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who is co-chair of the Southern California Federation of Scientists, also believes there are many such silent protests either by resignation or early retirement.
Honigsfeld, Parfrey and others involved in Aerospace Engineers/Workers for Social Responsibility recently attempted to survey defense plant workers about their attitudes toward militarization, but Honigsfeld said they dropped the plan because so few workers would even accept the questionnaire. He said he got only four to six responses.
Changing ideas about the ethics of buildings military and nuclear weapons are particularly relevant in California with its heavy concentration of defense plants. Department of Defense spending in California grew at a compound annual rate of nearly 10% in 1983-85, the Commission on State Finance estimates. And, it added, this year the Pentagon will pump more than $50 billion, nearly 10% of the gross state product, into the state. California defense plants got more than $30 billion in prime military contracts last year, compared to about $10 billion in Texas, the second biggest defense plant center.
Honigsfeld was born in the Soviet Union to Polish Jews who fled Hitler during World War II. He came to Los Angeles in 1947 as a boy of 5.
After graduating from UC Berkeley 21 years ago with a degree in mathematics, he worked on the Apollo project to put an American on the moon and later for two other defense contractors. But like many aerospace workers he lost his job in the early ‘70s during a major industry slowdown and for years after that, he said, he struggled to make ends meet. At one time he drove a taxi. He also taught high school mathematics in the inner city.
Last year he ran for the Assembly as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate, arguing that American troops stationed overseas should be brought home and that the economy should be redirected towards peaceful activities. In 1983 he was arrested three times for engaging in civil disobedience to protest the MX or Peacekeeper Missile, shipping U.S. military supplies to Central America and deploying Pershing cruise missiles.
“Most people in the military industry think it is their obligation not to express their opinions about military matters if their opinions are in any way critical,” he said, adding that he believes current U.S. foreign policy requires a large military establishment, a policy he wants changed.
A Hughes Aircraft spokesman, asked about Honigsfeld’s demonstrations against the project that employs him, said, “We have no policy on what employees do on their own time. That an employee’s work performance meets our requirements, that’s our main concern.” Honigsfeld, who is teaching himself Spanish, rides the RTD to work, where he is a software engineer on a portion of SDI that does not require a security clearance, although he has one.
“They say the reason for clearances is so enemies don’t get our secrets,” Honigsfeld said. “I agree. We need to keep our secrets. But another reason for security clearances is to quiet dissent.
Arrested Three Times
“In 1984, after I’d been arrested three times the year before, I had to go to the Hughes security department where they asked me: ‘If solicited would you keep secrets safe?’ ” Honigsfeld said.
He said he assured his employers he was not disloyal, had never been approached by any foreign agent and was neither surprised nor offended that he was asked.
Honigsfeld said he also believes the effect of such questioning is to discourage political activities by those holding security clearances.
“The government has a right, a reasonable right, to be interested in its secrets,” he added. “But we are supposed to have freedom, we are not supposed to be like the Soviets, and the government is not supposed to try and take away your livelihood because it doesn’t like your politics.”
“If you are going to act politically your best protection is to be in the open,” Honigsfeld believes. “Americans are not political, but they respect your right to be political.”
He believes that 70% “of the people in my industry are very moral people who go to church and try not to hurt anyone. They work in nice buildings with a pond, ferns, air conditioning; a nice place to go to work that is totally separated from what they do, which is build weapons of mass destruction.
“People in (defense plants) say we are working on a system and by that mean this set of circuits or that computer, which is a way of avoiding saying the truth, which is that we are getting ready for World War III,” Honigsfeld said.
Ron Hamilton of Lennox, a 33-year-old ex-Marine who assembles exotic graphite composites for Northrop’s F-18 supersonic fighter in Hawthorne, believes the world will always face the threat of war.
“We’re supposed to be the No. 1 country,” Hamilton said, adding that he believes the kind of weapons skilled workers like him build stop the Soviets from taking over America.
Bill Carpenter, manager of a Hughes Missile Systems Group lab that employs 90 people in Canoga Park, joined the military contracting work force 18 years ago in search of technical challenges.
But as time passed, Carpenter said, and his knowledge of global geopolitical issues grew, his thoughts lead him in the opposite direction from Honigsfeld.
“Our incentive is to maintain our technological superiority over the Russians so we have the ability to prevail over any threat they pose,” the former Simi Valley mayor said. “I really feel this is the kind of work I want to do, building (tactical) missile systems to defend this country.”
Carpenter said he believes that while high technology weapons may appear to be costly they actually save money because otherwise the U.S. would require a vastly larger conventional military capability with enormous personnel costs and reduced battlefield effectiveness.
Harold Shapiro, a Rockwell supervising circuit designer who has worked on the B-1 bomber since 1970, thinks of the work mostly in terms of technical challenges. “I look at a problem on a piece of paper and design a solution” Shapiro said.
“Last year at the Edwards Air Force Base air show they had wall-to-wall people who came to see high performance military aircraft. People love to see those airplanes fly,” Shapiro said.
“We don’t look at an airplane as one that could shoot another airplane out of the sky,” he said, “We look at the perfection in engineering.”
Shapiro, 51, of Yorba Linda, said he thinks about the great advances military work is bringing to mankind, of a coming age when civilian air transports may go aloft without fuel, tapping into microwave beams to power their engines. Such technological advances, he said, grow from weapons research.
Shapiro said he thinks of “the system” he works on as a set of circuits, not a bomber that could kill millions of people. If engineers thought that way, Shapiro said, “you couldn’t live with it. You couldn’t do your job.”
The B-1, he added, is “like life insurance: I have it but I don’t want to use it.”
Draftsman Tom Machado and machine operator Robin Podolsky quit military contracting work because of ethical qualms.
Machado’s exit began 10 years ago with the tragedy of a son who sought solace in drugs and found death.
Machado hadn’t been to Mass in decades, but the family tragedy made him return to the church.
Volunteering at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen on Skid Row, a long way from his comfortable, modest Westchester home, Machado said he began seeing a link between poverty and the military buildup and came to believe that “creating an economy that makes people homeless so we can build weapons is the biggest crime of all.
“I am a Christian pacifist now and do not believe in killing at all,” said Machado, 52. “I put my faith in God Almighty. I would do away with all weapons and maybe the wisest policy for America would be unilateral disarmament, but I realize that with our current foreign policy weapons are a necessary evil.
“But I feel you have to do something to change the way things are and that way is to start on a small scale, personally. I demonstrate. I got arrested at the Nevada (nuclear bomb) test site last August.
“I try to explain to people how military spending only appears to help the economy, when what it really does is create poverty by being a drain on our society,” he said, advancing one side of an argument among economists about military costs. Some economists argue that military spending is not a drain on the economy if it succeeds in preventing costly warfare.
Machado’s beliefs prompted him on Feb. 25, 1985, to write a memo to his boss at Hughes Aircraft, where he had worked on military projects for 22 years.
“As a Christian and imbued with the spirit of peacemaking, I have, in the past few years, felt a direct conflict between working in a defense related capacity and that of my beliefs that support world peace and social justice,” he wrote.
His two living children grown, Machado had resolved to quit military work even if it meant unemployment. He managed to get a job as head of product services and design for Hughes Communications, which does civilian work.
No Need to Act
Machado said he talked about his decision with co-workers in his group of 40 people, who toil in a locked room on a small piece of a weapons system he is not at liberty to discuss. “Most people would sympathize with my views but they didn’t feel any need to act,” he said.
Another who acted was Robin Podolsky, 32, who said she took a night-shift job fabricating shrouds for the submarine-based Trident missile at a Burbank Lockheed plant three years ago only because an automobile accident left her in debt.
A poet, Podolsky had previously worked for Lockheed on fabricating metal machining parts for the L-1011 commercial jetliner. She was laid off in 1981 because production was ending and she worked odd jobs for 18 months until Lockheed offered her a new job on Trident. Podolsky said she does not know Honigsfeld or Machado and has not gotten involved with anti-militarist groups,
“I felt a moral obligation to pay off the debt and a moral obligation not to work on Trident,” she said, a dilemma she settled by deciding to work only long enough to repay the debt.
But as the months passed, Podolsky said, the good money and the ability to acquire creature comforts as a reward for the demanding standards on her work began luring her to stay on.
“Most defense workers aren’t knee-jerk militarists, they’re just people who want a good paying job so they can take care of their families,” she said.
“So you go to work and pretty soon you get hooked on the life style and you keep working so you can buy the latest CD player and pay for the sports car or the camper, the things that allow you to escape from what you are doing at work and that don’t require you to create human relationships because its hard to care for other humans when you know your job is to build tools to kill them by the millions,” Podolsky said.
One day, Podolsky said, she got to thinking about this, decided not to purchase a computer she wanted and to finish paying off the debt as quickly as possible and then resign.
She found a job with the Los Angeles Unified School District at a salary $10,000 below what she made at Lockheed. But she said she is glad she quit Lockheed.
“I’m a lot happier today with my 13-year-old car and a feeling that I am building something, achieving something towards the world I want to live in instead of building killing machines,” Podolsky said.
