I remember one time as a young engineer traveling up to Beth Page on Long Island to visit Sperry about some work they were doing for the government on which my colleague and I were hired to monitor.
We spent an entire day there talking to the engineers and technicians there, then sometime after lunch, they handed us over to a guy who was avidly enthusiastic about the minutest of details in a radome fiberglass lay-up process, and he proceeded to tell us all about it in excruciating detail.
He finished at about 4:05PM and we walked out of the conference room and looked on a hanger-like open space of cubicles normally filled with UNION engineers that was COMPLETELY empty. Had been since 4:00PM.
They were hundreds deep, and they were unionized, and they had government largess behind them.
Wow; I hope they don’t assume that gravy train will go on forever. IIRC, Long Island lost a Grumman plant years ago (probably because of the same mindset related to government defense contracts).
Here in NJ our Motor Vehicle inspections are now limited to emissions; those remaining employees probably do well, but there are a lot less of them...