Lockheed Is Replacing Strikers at F-35 Plant in Texas Lockheed Martin said Friday that it had hired 300 temporary workers to replace striking union employees at its fighter plane plant in Fort Worth and could hire hundreds more. About 3,300 union workers went on strike there on April 23 over proposed changes in health benefits and a Lockheed plan to stop offering a traditional pension to newly hired workers. The factory builds the new F-35 strike fighter aircraft as well as an older model, the F-16, for foreign countries. The company has used salaried workers to keep building the planes at a slower rate. It started bringing in the temporary workers in late May. Joe Stout, a Lockheed spokesman, said the company would continue hiring substitutes and could bring in up to 2,000 if the strike continued through the summer. He said the company was using an employment agency to find people who had some experience in aerospace plants. Union officials said the company's actions would not weaken their resolve. Hiring the temporary workers "is a waste of taxpayer money," said Bob Wood, a spokesman for District Lodge 776 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. It's a dog and pony show. He said the union workers had received extensive training to work on the advanced F-35, while the temporary workers were trained for only a day or two. That's like saying somebody built a Cessna, and now they're going to walk in and build the F-35. Since the strike began, the union has also filed a series of complaints with the National Labor Relations Board that Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, had engaged in unfair labor practices. The union said in one filing that the company, based in Bethesda, Md., had moved some of the work on the F-35"s wings to its plant in Marietta, Ga., as a way of "interfering with, restraining and coercing" the workers who are on strike. Mr. Stout said the company had planned to make that move before the strike began. The F-35 is the largest military program, and the Pentagon has estimated that it could pay nearly $400 billion over 25 years for more than 2,400 of the planes. But the program has been delayed by technical difficulties, and the Pentagon recently slowed the early production rate to give the company more time to work through the technical problems. Pentagon officials have said that they are staying neutral about the strike. The Obama administration has generally supported organized labor. But the Pentagon has also been pressing Lockheed to lower the production costs of the F-35. Company officials said a broad shift toward tighter cost controls on military contractors had increased contractors" interest in lowering pension and health costs over time. The union workers in Fort Worth rejected Lockheed's last contract offer in April. The offer included pay raises of 3 percent a year for each of the next three years as well as $3,000 signing bonuses for each worker. Lockheed would also have maintained the traditional defined-benefit pension plan for current workers and increased the monthly benefits. But workers objected to the company's plans to reduce health care options and provide only 401 (k) -type retirement plans for newly hired workers. Company officials said they had eliminated traditional pension plans for all salaried workers hired since 2006. They said most of the company's other unions agreed to that change since then. Mr. Stout, the Lockheed spokesman, said that since the strike began, about 250 workers had returned to work in Fort Worth. He said most of the 300 workers at other sites who had joined the strike had also returned to work. Mr. Wood, the union spokesman, did not dispute those numbers. But he said the union viewed the company's attempt to eliminate the pension for new workers as "an attack on the installment plan" against the retirement plan of current workers. "First, the company will do that," he said. And then, when a new contract comes around, they will want to freeze the plan for everyone else. And the people who don't have a pension are not going to fight for these guys" pensions."