Shipyard Layoffs Point Up Plight of Jobless Trying to Sustain Way of Life

For five years, Paul Robbins worked as a laborer at Todd Shipyards Corp. in San Pedro. A shipfitter’s helper, he earned $13.20 an hour, a wage that allowed him to afford a home in Lakewood and support his wife and two young daughters.

Now, however, Robbins’ middle-class life style has all but disappeared. Laid off in August and unable to find another job, he has watched his checking account dwindle to as low as $12, forcing him to rely on his mother-in-law to make his most recent house payment. The $166-a-week unemployment benefits he receives will end in several weeks.

“It’s very frustrating,” Robbins said, his eyes moist. “My self-respect is gone, and sometimes I’m not a very nice person to be around at home.”

Robbins, a 34-year-old college graduate, is one of hundreds of former Todd workers laid off in recent months as the company’s workload decreased.

While many, including Robbins, believed they would eventually be called back to work, their hopes were dashed a few weeks ago when Todd failed to win a major Navy contract, prompting it to announce that it will lay off 1,200 more workers by January.

Starting Over

“The conclusion my wife and I have come to is that we have to start over, and we’ve decided to move to Maine,” Robbins said. “We can’t stay in California anymore because we just can’t afford it. We’ve got to move to a state where it is cheaper to live.”

“I’d rather stay here because this is where our home is and where my family is,” said his 28-year-old wife, Colleen, who works part time as a nurse. “But his family is there, and it’s a chance to maybe make a better life for ourselves and our children.”

Paul Robbins’ predicament may pale in comparison with those of other workers who have never earned as much as he did at the shipyard. Many of them, living from paycheck to paycheck, scramble each month not just to meet a house payment, but simply to come up with the rent.

But Robbins’ plunge from middle class has been painful, and it has been shared by other workers throughout the country who have been laid off in recent years from manufacturing jobs that pay well. At the same time, these workers have faced increasingly tough competition for new, lower-paying jobs in the service sector as the work force has continued to expand.

‘A New Era’

“I gave up trying to find a job that pays that good because I know they don’t exist,” Robbins said. “This is a new era. I’m ready to take a job for $5, $6 or $7 an hour, and that would not even pay my mortgage bill.

“This is the high-tech computer age,” Robbins added. “Any kind of factory worker is starting to get hit, and employers are going to start saying, ‘You’re going to work for $4 an hour, or you’re not going to work at all.’ It’s the old supply-and-demand law. You’ve got all these workers who just need to eat, and the big national company says, ‘Oh, we just lowered the wages.’ ”

The layoffs at Todd have come at a time when the strong national economy has spurred an increase in the civilian work force. The Labor Department recently reported that the number of jobs rose to 107.1 million in March, up 434,000 from February.

But nearly all the growth was recorded in the service sector, while the number of manufacturing jobs stayed at the same level as last summer, according to Harvey Hamel, a senior economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. The number of manufacturing jobs, which pay an average hourly wage of $9.44, stands at 19.7 million, he said.

(In California, the number of manufacturing jobs in 1984 totaled 2 million, up from 1.9 million in 1983, according to the state Employment Development Department. Service jobs totaled 2.5 million in 1984, up from 2.3 million in the previous year.)

Hamel said that, nationally, the manufacturing sector has never recovered from the battering it took during the 1981-82 recession. Manufacturing lost 2.3 million jobs in the 16 months ending in November, 1982, and has regained only 1.6 million, he said.

Moreover, laborers such as Robbins face an additional problem in finding new jobs because of the expanding work force, Hamel said. “In the last six months or so unemployment has remained kind of flat,” he said. “There is a continued increase in job creation, but as fast as they are created, there are many people coming into the work force who have not been there before.”

“The problems many workers have is that the baby-boom generation has put this enormous bulge in the economy,” said Barry Bluestone, an economist at Boston College. “People knocked out of work are competing with this bulge for the good jobs in the labor market.”

Called ‘Skidders’

Bluestone, former director of the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College, said a recent institute study focusing on 320 laid-off auto industry workers showed that those who had not been recalled to work and had taken new jobs outside the industry suffered a 30% drop in wages. Such workers are called “skidders” because of their drop down the occupational hierarchy, he said.

The prospect of becoming a “skidder” is already a reality for some former Todd workers.

Manuel Briones, 55, a boilermaker at Todd for 20 years until he was laid off in November, 1983, said he lost his home last August because he could not make the $868-a-month payment. He and his wife and their four children have moved into a relative’s house.

“It’s all gone,” said Briones, referring to the home, which he purchased eight years ago. He said he has been able to get some part-time work as a casual longshoreman and hopes to be hired soon at Southwest Marine Inc. The Terminal Island firm recently won a ship repair contract and announced that it may hire as many as 300 new workers.

Not Optimistic

Robbins said he, too, applied for work at Southwest Marine, but never expected to land a job there because of the large number of people, many of them former co-workers, who filled out applications. He became equally pessimistic about getting a job from one of the many oil refineries where he applied.

“It’s just masses every time you go into a place to apply for a job,” Robbins said. “There are 20 or 30 people coming in or out the door who are applying for the same job. If you figure that every hour there are 30 people, and that there are eight hours in a day, that’s 240 people for maybe 35 or 40 openings.”

Robbins, who has a degree in personnel and labor relations from Cal State Long Beach, said he has focused his job hunting on an entry-level position in a field with a brighter future. Such a change, he said, would mean accepting a starting salary considerably lower than he was earning at Todd.

Management Trainee

“I figured with a college education it would get me into the doors as a management trainee,” said Robbins, adding that he has filled out countless applications at firms ranging from banks to retail stores to restaurant chains. “At first I wanted to go into personnel, and I talked to a lot of big corporations, and I found out they hire a lot from within the company. At this point I’ll go into anything.”

Since he has been laid off, Robbins said, he and his wife have been forced to “cut a lot of corners” as bills piled up.

His mother-in-law, besides making his $700-a-month mortgage payment, has also paid the nursery school bill for their 3-year-old daughter, Kristine, so his wife could work part time while he searched for a job. The couple’s other daughter, Sarah, 5, attends kindergarten.

Paul Robbins spends much of his time sprucing up his home so it will bring a good price. He plans to take a load of his family’s belongings to Maine soon, and hopes to move there permanently when his house sells. An income tax refund and severance pay from Todd should help pay some backlogged bills and finance the move, he said.

Real Estate Market

Colleen Robbins said she and her husband have already scanned real estate ads for homes in Maine, and they believe they could buy a home comparable to their present one for about half the price. The couple paid about $90,000 for their Lakewood home in 1980.

But they won’t be able to afford such a house immediately, she said, and hope to buy a small lakeside cottage to begin with.

Paul Robbins said that if his wife is able to find full-time work, he would like to go back to school and get an advanced degree, perhaps in accounting. Such a degree, he said, could help him land a good job and get his life going again.

“All I can do is keep plugging.”