Tldr; links to map of workers in local arms industry and a webmap of actual facilities and city-by-city data
Rationale
Weapons manufacturing and design are critical components of the North Texas regional economy, and of the United States economy as a whole. Many of the companies delivering materials to advance the occupations of Gaza, Haiti, Cuba, Korea, and other nations around the globe, have a strong presence in North Texas, supporting thousands of families. Cities such as McKinney, Dallas, and Irving provide capital incentives totaling tens of millions of dollars to Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and others. In its annual list of top employers, the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce estimates 10,000+ employees work for Lockheed Martin, 5,000+ each for L3Harris and Raytheon, 1,000+ each for Halliburton and Bell Helicopter, and a few hundred at Boeing. This excludes components suppliers, such as Texas Instruments and Qorvo, who employ 10,000+ additional employees in the region to develop semi-conductors and other advanced microelectronic components.
What does it mean that there are 50,000+ people in our communities working in a quotidian way to manufacture, design, and test advanced weapons systems? What sort of political consciousness do you develop on the shop floor of a missile factory? How do we organize for the end of war and imperialism when those manufacturing its parts sleep soundly right next door to us?
It is both difficult and essential for American workers to build movements strong enough to overpower reactionary political organizations. I will be the first to admit I am naïve to the level of social and political transformation that will entail. To begin to crawl towards what it might mean, I suspect it could be helpful to conduct a localized analysis of the conditions I am up against, even if all it does it help me avoid the shame of making the wrong demands, knocking on the wrong doors, all at the wrong time. I also find any analysis of the labor structure of the imperialist weapons factory ought to extend beyond the shop floor to incorporate the civil organizations and local governance structures that fund the development of colonial infrastructures and that normalize this daily support for imperialism plausible, such as North Texas schools that recruit working-class people to spend their careers with weapons manufacturers.
It will take immense coordination to break apart industries employing 50,000+ people, garner support from the 200,000+ non-workers who are supported directly by their wages, and fend off a likely backlash of both state-sanctioned and extralegal violence from a dizzying array of entrenched local bureaucrats and capitalists. Though the frictions of the work itself can likely be harnessed, where do we even go to look for fissures and cracks to exploit? For me, a geographic analysis- using methods developed by Gilmore, Woods, and others – can be useful for thinking about all of this.
The Companies
It was possible to identify 7 clusters of weapons companies in DFW using public information in Google Maps. They are laid out in the map below. They represent the current plants and offices used by the workforce of Raytheon, L3Harris, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Bell Helicopter, and Lockheed Martin. The Lockheed and Bell facilities are co-located with official Department of Defense operations. Raytheon had a Dallas location but it closed earlier this year.
You can also go here for a full screen, interactive map.
So we know where some factories are. How do we know where all those workers live? Using publicly available data, I can estimate the presumed home location of around 24,000 of the workers affiliated with these companies, as of 2020. There are some difficulties here, as the data is old, and its possible the companies have made moves to expand or relocate. But absent any other method, such as using cellphone data, its not too complicated to generate estimates of where workers live; I identify the worksite’s Census block, then look at where workers who commute to that block live using the origin-destination structure. Because blocks are small, these employers are the only employers in their Census blocks, its fairly easy to assume the workers who commute to that block are linked to the company. You can then aggregate the origin blocks by city. I couldn’t get Northrup’s employment count data to appear, so counts from their facilities are excluded from the rest of the data.
The Data
The largest concentration of workers by raw count belongs to Ft. Worth, with 8,496 residents working at one of the selected companies. This comes as no surprise given that city’s massive military presence. Following next are Arlington, famous for the presence of GM’s most profitable plant, and Grand Prairie, with its historic link to naval and air manufacturing. Next up is Dallas, then its back to a slew of Ft. Worth suburbs with Benbrook, Mansfield, Keller, Burleson, Weatherford, North Richland Hills and Saginaw rounding out the top 12. (You can download all the data here if you want an even closer look.) Irving comes at number 12, then more Ft. Worth suburbs until you hit Plano at number 20.
But there is even more to the story. For some cities, the overall size of the workforce is small, so employment at these facilities makes up an unusual share of the local economy. Take, for instance, the city of Aledo. With a population of 4,858, it is essentially an exurban small town, located just west of the ever expanding Ft. Worth suburban frontier. Yet it sends 124 workers to the weapons facilities in Ft. Worth. These workers account for nearly 5% of the total local workforce of 2,270. If we assume that they also bring home 5% of the city’s income, we can estimate these workers earn about $11.3 million a year, which is triple the amount of the entire City of Aledo’s budget. The table below shows the share of each city’s workforce associated with these weapons plants by percent of overall workforce. These areas and their non-labor infrastructures could be either potential targets for organizing or wellsprings of reaction.
The raw data is available as an API-accessible .csv here, or you can interact with it as a spreedsheet here.
Finally, a visualization of all this data together, with Aledo highlighted. The skew towards the west of Ft. Worth, and Tarrant County in general, is obvious, but is largely due to the overwhelming size of Lockheed and Bell. Raytheon and L3Harris, whose efforts are more concentrated in design than mass manufacturing, have smaller footprints, concentrated in Collin County. This data excludes expansions by Raytheon in Richardson post-COVID. Boeing is distributed broadly, but skews into Grand Prairie, along with Lockheed and Bell.
Closing Thoughts
There are too many! What are the cultures of these neighborhoods? What are their politics and institutions? We know Tarrant County votes heavily Republican, but that seems almost comically useless when it comes to developing actual strategy or acting on this information. We can estimate weapons employment brings in a total of at least $1.7 billion into the pockets of civilians in North Texas each year. More to come, maybe…
Camille Kaplan 