TRW Girds for Big Layoffs--Possibly Involving 3,000 Jobs
TRW has notified some employees at its Redondo Beach-based Space & Defense Sector to begin looking for new jobs in advance of what could be layoffs affecting as many as several thousand jobs, it was learned Tuesday.
A TRW spokeswoman said the company did not have any immediate plan to implement such a layoff, but acknowledged that current efforts by the Pentagon to make a large reduction in defense spending has created an uncertain business environment.
“There is nothing official that has occurred in that area and any discussion of programs or numbers of people is speculation at this point,” she said.
“The government is going through exercises to get reductions in the budget of $33 billion, looking at such things as reductions, cancellations and stretch-outs,” she said. “We and the entire industry are facing some of those kinds of things. We do not have any information at this point that would result in a layoff of that size.”
A supervisor at the company, however, said he was notified by his management that a major contract cancellation is coming that would affect up to 3,000 employees and that he should begin looking for a new job. The program is secret and could not be discussed.
A second TRW engineer said he also was told by his management in a meeting that he should begin looking for a new job because of a layoff that could affect up to 3,000 at TRW. The engineer said his supervisor did not say when the layoffs would occur but also laid the blame to a secret weapons project.
TRW employs 18,000 at its Space Park facility, which builds large military intelligence satellites, communications satellites and scientific satellites, as well as a broad array of electronics gear. Some of the company’s largest operations involve programs whose existence have never been acknowledged, including spy satellites that can listen in on radio, telephone and other electronic transmissions.
A layoff of 3,000 employees, if it occurs, would reflect a sizable loss in contracts, reaching well beyond $100 million in annual revenue. TRW reported revenue of $892 million in its electronics and space systems business in 1986.
An Air Force official who is familiar with TRW’s “white” programs, those that are not secret, said he is unaware of any major contract cancellations at the company that would force a large number of layoffs. The Pentagon canceled in December an $85-million program to build automated message processing equipment, but this was not considered a major loss. Separately, TRW recently was dropped from an experimental communications satellite program for the National Aeronautics and Space Adminstration.
At the same time, TRW noted that it has acquired a number of contracts, including a $750-million award for five Air Force early warning satellites, a communications satellite worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars and a number of software engineering contracts.
