John F. Torpey Jr.

Jack Torpey is responsible for the strategic coordination of all collective bargaining activity for Raytheon’s four domestic businesses and its International and Business Development operations. Raytheon, a legendary Route 128 high-tech manufacturing pioneer, is now a $24 billion, 68,000 employee global company, specializing in defense, homeland security, and international governmental markets.

He oversees 20 domestic and 6 international collectively bargained agreements covering 5500 employees. He negotiates and implements all corporate-wide initiatives, and all LR decision-making and effects bargaining related to any mergers, acquisitions and restructuring that Raytheon undertakes.

Jack joined Raytheon in 1990 as Manager of its self-insured worker’s compensation program covering 20,000 workers in MA and RI. In 1993, he became Manager, Labor Relations, negotiating and administering 12 labor agreements with unions performing Federal work.

“On tough issues, Jack is the company’s go-to,” says Arthur Osborne, Jr., Director of Labor/Employee Relations for Raytheon IDS, “I was an IBEW 1505 officer, when we met 20 years ago. Jack was respected as a straight shooter who’d try fresh solutions, and a lawyer who wrote agreements with as few words as possible. Differences were occasionally ironed out over a few quaffs of ale.”

Growing up in a Roslindale union family, Jack paid for college cleaning Prudential Tower offices at night and was a steward for SEIU #254. Moving to the Goodyear Rubber Factory in Cambridge, he prompted a UAW organizing drive, but “that election fell one vote short, and a month later I was fired,” he notes. Reinstated after the NRLB called, he was watched like a hawk for two long months. “I was called in and told I had the right skills for a management job,” he recalled. “I decided they were right.”

He is a University of Massachusetts at Boston and Suffolk Law School graduate. Before joining Raytheon, Jack was Assistant General Counsel for the Mass Turnpike Authority and was an associate at Murphy and Beane.

Jack served 33 years as a military Reservist, as a Crew Chief with the Air National Guard, then as a JAG with the MA Army National Guard, serving 3 years as the Staff Judge Advocate (SJA). In 2011, he retired from the US Army Reserve as a Lieutenant Colonel (LTC). Jack’s family includes his wife Cynthia, his daughter Meghan, her husband Steve, and son Sean and his wife Dana.