From the archives: Arms Production and Trends in Technology

From END Info 16 | June 2020. Download here

by Ken Coates

Introduction: In March 1987, the Transport and General Workers Union (now part of Unite) in the UK convened a European Trade Union Conference on Arms Jobs Conversion. Ron Todd, TGWU General Secretary at the time, wrote: “duty surely calls upon us to look for the next steps in our work for peace, and specifically for arms jobs conversion. We need now to start to build international trade union commitment to these aims, involving working people directly and actively in this vital work for humanity’s future.” More than thirty years on, interest in the work envisaged by Todd and others is increasing, including amongst a large layer of trade unionists. Are the successors of the TGWU willing to take up this important work again? It is to be hoped that they are. We reprint an extract from Ken Coates’ paper to the conference as part of ongoing efforts from END Info to contribute to the debate around arms conversion, socially useful production and nuclear disarmament.

The arms economy takes up somewhere between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the whole worlds's income, at least a quarter of all manufacturing production. This is the kind of proportion that has been used by nations in the past to set aside annually for their economic development. The industrially developed nations, in fact, set aside today much larger proportions of their income for investment (around 25 per cent); but when arms expenditure is added to this, then current consumption is reduced to take up two-thirds only of all economic activity. Since the less developed nations spend similar proportions on arms, their investment in development has to be restrained to allow for current consumption adequate for bare survival. It is a fact which Seymour Melman has regularly demonstrated that the countries even at high levels of development which spend the highest proportion of their income on arms (e.g. the USA and UK) spend much lower proportions on investment than others (e.g. Japan and Denmark) whose arms bill is much less. As a result, increases in productivity are least in the USA and most in Japan .

However we look at it, such a waste of up to one tenth of human effort can only be regarded as insane, and the implications of nuclear arms escalation are positively suicidal. What is more, arms production is a less and less labour intensive industry. Even the real increases in arms spending of the last few years - of about 3 per cent a year - have resulted in average cuts in unemployment of 4 per cent a year. In the UK 47 per cent of the arms budget is now spent on equipment, 33 per cent on personnel. Ten years ago 33 per cent went on equipment and 47 per cent on personnel.

The employment effects of this kind of expenditure are quite complex. World-wide, unemployment runs at some ninety million, while a further three-hundred million people are working precariously in underemployed occupations. But the population explosion means that the workforce is going to rise very rapidly, from its present level of 2.2 billion to at least 2.8 billion at the end of the century. World-wide, then, we must create six hundred million jobs for the newly arriving workforce, and nearly four hundred million for those out of work or inadequately employed. Ninety per cent of this billion job short fall is in the underdeveloped south, which is gripped in a massive debt crisis, that eats up every possibility of productive investment for many years to come. This is the context in which military expenditure must be evaluated. Ruth Leger Sivard calculates that war budgets generate employment for one hundred million people worldwide. Why do we not see these jobs as at any rate a small step towards the solution of the problem?

Fewer jobs

The answer is that military spending undercuts other investment and displaces it. Arms expenditure creates many fewer jobs than those which could be seeded by a similar investment in labour intensive occupations, in education , health , transport or community care. More employment in these sectors creates an immediate increase in civilian demand, and therefore stimulates economic growth in all other sectors of the economy. There are only two ways in which military expenditure can stimulate growth, and both of them are exceptionally painful. It can enter a technological race in which ever more capital is burned up in the production of ever more elaborate weapons systems, employing ever fewer workers. This is the process which Mary Kaldor has called “Baroque Technology”. Such a process will enlarge arms corporations at the tax payer's expense, but it will do nothing for jobs and real growth in useable goods and services. The second option is to have an actual war, which will certainly create big destruction, and if we survive it, big demand for re-construction.

Up to now, since 1945 mankind has been “lucky” in that such wars have been confined to conventional weapons and “limited” zones: even though they have been incredibly costly in human life ... The grotesque butchery [of the] battlefield is carefully sustained by arms manufacturers, who cheerfully sell to [all] sides.

Whether we have such wars or not , is not an economic decision , but we are entitled, as trade unionists, to say that this is a political option which we reject. If we should reject it when it involves the slaughter of our own populations, we should reject it no less when it involves the export of mass-destruction to Third World peoples. Human politics is impossible if we do not oppose war, and also military build-ups and the cynical trade in arms. In this sense, of course, the political war is the prior domain, and should determine economic choices.

There are also, however, very solid economic reasons why military spending worsens the employment situation. It can outbid civilian industry for resources, because it is funded by central state provision, whilst others must usually assemble their resources in the competitive market place. It imposes strict secrecy which can only impede the spread of technological knowledge, and hinder the development and application of new techniques. And it seeds inefficiency as every student of the military is abundantly aware. This last problem is the worst, because it dooms its victims to lose out in competition, and thus raises levels of crisis, deepening economic slumps.

Because military investment is now so capital intensive, it skews every effort to redistribute income. One billion dollars create 8,250 jobs in the manufacture of Trident missiles, while for the same cost, 52,000 people could be employed in education and 102,500 in public services. The multiplier or knock-on effect of 102,500 jobs is obviously highly significant in all other sectors of the economy, whether public or private. Military spending thus reinforces social, geographical and sectoral inequalities, and locks those engaging in it into growing structural crises. To move out of mass unemployment, the advanced economies have to generate redistribution between classes, spatially between rich and poor areas nationally and internationally, and industrially towards new projects and modern technologies.

The worst feature of military spending is that, in addition to debilitating the present economy, it devastates the future. As military R&D gobbles up more and more of the social investment in future technologies, it lays waste the opportunities of new generations...

Key Factors

The possibilities of converting arms production and research to peaceful use depend on a number of factors which need to be held in mind together:

1. Arms production and research is financed by nation state governments which have a popular concensus behind this expenditure, however much such support may be artificially encouraged by the propaganda of authoritarian or military regimes.

2. It is much more difficult to develop a concensus behind state expenditure on non-arms production, since opinion tends to be divided between many alternative directions for state spending, e.g. health education, housing, transport, etc.

3. The very large companies have a vested interest in arms production because a) arms quickly become obsolete and have to be replaced; b) the cost of military goods is very difficult for governments to control by comparison with other costs; and c) arms do not compete with the other products of big companies, as, e.g. public transport does with the private car.

4. Although, in fact, state spending on arms employs fewer people for any sum spent than does state spending on peaceful purposes, nevertheless, workers in the arms industry have no confidence in their re-employment as a result of arms conversion.

5. There are some real technical problems in converting production from military to peaceful use, though these tend to be exaggerated and are far less important than the structural reasons, by which arms production is built into the military industrial complexes of company and government, which can be seen to dominate the economy of the USA and of other states.

It follows from consideration of these factors that the main requirement of any programme of arms conversion is that clear alternatives should be put forward for the use of the productive capacity now devoted to arms. Such alternatives have been put forward by a number of company wide committees of trade unions in Britain, especially by Lucas Aerospace and Vickers combine committees. The essential elements in such alternative programmes are:

a) taxpayers can be assured that “their” money is going to meet needs that they feel to be equally or more demanding than defence;

b) non-taxpayers (pensioners, unemployed, etc.) can believe that they will benefit in goods or services and in employment opportunities from the conversion policy;

c) workers can be assured that as many (or more) jobs will be generated by the alternative programmes.

None of this can be left to the market and private enterprise; but will require planning by governments with strong involvement of both unions and local government authorities, encouraging local community organisations to think through and agree on alternative claims for resource use. Conversion from the present arms economy can only be successful as part of a wider programme of popular economic activity. The alternative to arms has to grow in the hearts and minds of the people, as they explore new and exciting ways of using the vast resources at the disposal of human beings in the world today. The strongest moral appeal must be to raise the incomes of the people in the Third World. In the Socialist International's report Global Challenge it is estimated that a cut of just one tenth in the current level of spending on armaments could not only create 20 million new jobs in Europe in a decade, but could also raise output in the Third World by more than 50 per cent over the same period.