Weapons continue to pass undisturbed even while migrants – themselves victims of arms exported from one country to another – are prevented from landing. Weaponwatch is armed only with knowledge, international solidarity and digital technology in order to build free moving networks of observers, unveiling the global trading system. Through ports we observe the movement of weapons through ports, as neither dockers nor seafarers are comfortable handling such high risk items. On occasion we refuse to handle them or let them land.
Gianni Alioti, head of the FIM-CISL International Office, has written a six page report arguing that the idea that the military industry is a backbone of the economic and employment system is just a myth, debunked by official sector data. The first two pages are summarised below. It is written in Italian.
He stresses that the prevailing ‘common sense’ must be challenged. Widespread misconceptions persist even within workers’ unions. The first is that investments and the growth of turnover in the military industry ensure important employment effects whereas over the last ten years turnover has increased and profits have risen by 773%, whilst employment has fallen by 16%.
The second is the importance of technological innovation in the military field for the ‘spinoffs’ for the civilian sector. That importance dissolved with the end of the Cold War and the development of microelectronics
The myth of the military industry as an essential sector of the economic and employment system characterized by highly advanced and ‘bearing’ technologies is today found only in ‘war propaganda’.
This is all the more true in our country where the degree of subordination of the Italian aerospace and defense industry (with a few exceptions of products and systems) to the US is very high. There are considerable constraints both on a technological and research level, and on a political and financial level (shareholders, markets, exports and supply chains).
We have the data that I have been monitoring for about twenty years on the trend of turnover and employment in the aeronautical industry at a European level, using the information contained in the annual reports of the ASD (AeroSpace and Defense Industries Association of Europe). Over a 40-year period, this sector has gone from 579,000 in 1980 to just over 537,000 employees in 2021 (minus 7.2 percent), after having dropped to around 400,000 employees in 1995 (Chart 1).
In the same period, the overall turnover of the sector, at constant values, more than tripled. The gap between the trend in turnover and employment is impressive.
But the most surprising result emerges by disaggregating the data of the aeronautical sector between military and civilian. While the workers in the sector employed in the military field went from 382,000 to about 175,000 (54 percent less) between 1980 and 2021, employment in the civilian field, on the other hand, grew from 197,000 to almost 363 thousand (84 percent more).
Not having participated, as an equal partner of the French, Spanish and Germans in the creation of Airbus, has cost the marginality of the Italian industry in the conception, development and production of civil aircraft. Our country has chosen to participate only in the field of helicopters, turboprop and executive aircraft and become a simple sub-supplier of the industry US Air Force. In Italy 50 percent of jobs were lost in the military aeronautical sector, without any growth in the civil aeronautical sector (except for a 10 percent increase in the helicopter sector)*.
Gianni Alioti stresses: “Although talk of diversification and reconversion of the arms sector into the civilian sector may appear illusory, especially in a phase of rearmament and exponential increase in military spending like this, we must never tire of working towards a future perspective of peace and disarmament”.
*Source: elaboration by Gianni Alioti on data from the annual report ASD (AeroSpace and Defense Industries Association of Europe)
o
Armourers thrive by damaging people & planet 