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For Jobs, Peace and a Pro-Worker Foreign Policy

The U.S. military budget—projected to reach $1 trillion in 2026, larger than those of the next ten nations combined—continues to soar out of control with bipartisan support. Threats or use of military force are still a regular feature of U.S. foreign policy, under presidents of both major parties. When not engaging directly in military action around the world, the U.S. fights proxy wars via the funding and arming of foreign forces, many of which have atrocious human rights records. All of this is done on the backs of working people, not only in the U.S., but all around the world. The U.S. military-industrial complex is a global enterprise that siphons funds from workers and turns those dollars into endless war, demolished cities, broken lives, dead children, and brazen genocide.

The U.S. government defends excessive military spending by claiming this supports people in uniform who put their lives on the line, but in reality more than half of the military budget goes to private, for-profit contractors. There is no end in sight to the long-held practice of awarding lavish contracts to politically-well-connected defense contractors, who cannot pass an audit and who are protected from scrutiny by the politicians they have bought. American military policy leaves nothing but misery in its wake, while reaping huge profits for wealthy warmongering elites. War is good for their business, and they are indeed thriving.

In the Middle East, the U.S. is involved in a tangled, contradictory web of alliances and wars. The Biden administration, and now Trump, have continued America’s long tradition of meddling in the region. Most notably, the U.S. government continues to support Israel’s widespread aggression, carrying out genocide in Gaza, as well as bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Biden failed to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran, keeping in place the severe economic sanctions imposed by the first Trump Administration that are themselves a form of warfare. Trump has now escalated with direct missile strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, further fanning the flames which perpetuate the cycles of war and occupation throughout the region. Simultaneously, the U.S. has maintained its close relationship with Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship with a human rights record no better than Iran’s. The U.S.-Saudi alliance has prolonged the Yemeni Civil War since 2014, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands dead, the starvation of over 100,000 children, and the displacement of millions from their homes.

Cuba poses no economic or military threat to the U.S. Our government has no justification for the economic blockade of Cuba, which, as members of UE Local 150 who visited the island this past year learned first-hand, makes it more difficult for Cubans to access medicine, food, and essential life-giving supplies. The blockade hurts workers in both countries. Jobs are lost, while U.S. manufacturers are denied a major market just 90 miles offshore. Instead of restoring diplomatic relationships and lifting the economic embargo, the U.S. prefers to portray an island nation of fewer than 10 million people as a threat.

UE has long warned of the danger of nuclear weapons, a position only strengthened by our close relationship over the past three decades with the militant Japanese union federation Zenroren. As workers from the only nation that has suffered a nuclear attack, Zenroren has a deep commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons as absolutely necessary to winning a decent life for working people. The current escalation of tensions with China and Russia raise the specter of nuclear war, which would be catastrophic for human life.

The question of militarization is one with which we are intimately familiar as a working class. At the level of budget appropriations, we see how defense and policing budgets continue to rise with bipartisan support while life saving policies like healthcare and housing, public services, education, and science budgets continue to shrink. As the U.S. funds violence abroad, militarization at home continues to target migrant populations, workers of color, and pro-Palestinian organizers. Under Biden, budgets for CBP and ICE rose to $29.4 billion, a considerable increase from Trump’s budgets in the previous term. Now Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has put ICE on steroids, expanding its funding to exceed all but the largest 15 military budgets in the world. Each new presidency builds on the same violent legacy of mass disappearance and forced deportation of migrant families and communities. This is happening today across the country, carried out by masked federal agents and aided by local law enforcement.

As a labor movement, we face the threat of disappearance off the streets if our political activity threatens the ruling class. We face deportation if our citizenship status does not fit an increasingly narrow definition of “legal.” Our workplaces are hyper-surveilled and secured— in many cases, by armed police. Universities function as extensions of repressive government power, collaborating with police and federal agencies to militarize campuses, brutalize protestors, disappear activists, and impose policies and academic discipline to repress popular movements.

The biggest threat to the people of the U.S. is not Iran, China, or military invasions from other countries, but a rapacious military-industrial complex, which:

  • Fails to provide living-wage jobs, affordable healthcare, education, housing, and necessary social services;
  • Exacerbates the climate crisis;
  • Threatens nuclear war or nuclear catastrophe;
  • Furthers systemic racism and gender discrimination.

These circumstances call for us to be steadfast, principled, and unyielding in our resistance. Further, we must recognize our responsibility, as workers in the U.S., to workers elsewhere who are affected by U.S. foreign and military policies. UE has a long history of standing with our international comrades. We have been on the front lines of anti-war efforts from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq—and most recently in our call for a ceasefire in Palestine in October 2023 and arms embargo in 2024.

Foreign and military policies should defend the interests of working people, not the wealthy. UE has long believed that the labor movement should promote its own foreign policy based on diplomacy and labor solidarity. As members of UE, we must lead the U.S. labor movement into becoming a force that is willing to use mass political action, strikes, and other militant tactics to win the struggle against militarism and imperialism.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79th UE CONVENTION:

  1. Calls on the union at all levels to:
    1. Inform and engage members on the need to change U.S. foreign policy to promote diplomacy, democracy, and workers rights, and encourage members to take action to secure those changes;
    2. Facilitate forums for members to share their experiences leading campaigns around international and foreign-policy issues, and workshops for member-to-member education so that other locals may learn from them;
    3. Promote involvement in labor-based efforts to effectively create that change;
    4. Support About Face, formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, and other anti-war, pro-peace worker organizations;
    5. Educate our members on how U.S. imperial ventures are an attack on U.S. workers;
    6. Engage in a discussion within UE and beyond on how to build strike power to leverage political demands;
    7. Coordinate with other unions to take action on demilitarizing the economy;
  2. Calls on the national union to:
    1. Make space in the UE NEWS for articles on international and foreign-policy issues, and to encourage members to submit articles on those subjects;
    2. Disseminate, and as necessary create, materials relating U.S. foreign policy to the concerns of the workers and specifically about the history of Palestine and its relationship to U.S. labor;
  3. Demands the U.S. government invest in peace and build economic security at home by:
    1. Reducing the military budget while improving wages, healthcare, and pensions of soldiers and veterans;
    2. Reappropriating defense savings into transportation, housing, healthcare, education, renewable resource development, or other peaceful infrastructure;
    3. The creation of a fund to guarantee any worker or soldier displaced by conversion from a war economy to a peace economy up to four years’ living allowance and educational expenses;
  4. Further demands the U.S. government abroad:
    1. Cease using U.S. military and intelligence agencies in interventions against nations which pose no threat to the American people;
    2. Cease all harassment of and economic sanctions on Venezuela;
    3. End the use of taxpayer money for further militarization of Latin America;
    4. Seek an immediate, negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine;
    5. Cease the use of drones to attack foreign nationals or U.S. citizens;
    6. Reinstate the agreement negotiated with Iran which prevents its development of nuclear weapons, and normalize relations with the country;
    7. Cease military aid to countries with disgraceful human rights records;
    8. Cease all funding for the National Missile Defense program and the U.S. Space Force, and support efforts at the United Nations to ban all weapons in space;
    9. End incentives for corporations to profit from exporting weapons abroad;
    10. De-escalate tensions with China;
    11. Normalize relations with the Cuban government, and end the blockade on trade and travel for Americans;
    12. End pressure against countries that wish to trade freely with Cuba;
    13. Cease funding and support for Cuban-exile terrorist groups;
    14. Comply with the United Nations call for an end to the inhumane over 60-year Cuban embargo;
    15. Reinstate humanitarian aid to countries in need;
  5. Supports the struggle of our sister union Zenroren to halt the repeal of Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, to close all U.S. military bases in Japan, and to halt all efforts to convert the Japanese Self-Defense Force to offensive purposes;
  6. Welcomes the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by the United Nations, and demands that the U.S. government take all necessary steps to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons;
  7. Calls on the corporate media and the U.S. government to end its campaign of misinformation, fraud, and manipulation against the interests of our working-class comrades abroad;
  8. Supports the efforts of Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities to pass the People Over the Pentagon Act.
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