On a Wing and a Prayer : C-5 Work Near End, Lockheed Ponders Fate of Watts Plant
As the Watts riot raged along Imperial Highway in 1965, William Thomas watched from his nearby home on Mona Street, where his eight brothers and sisters and his mother lived on welfare.
A few years later, a group of well-groomed executives and then-Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty showed up one day at a junkyard on Mona, just down the street from the Thomas home, to break ground for a new Lockheed aircraft plant.
After the plant was built, Thomas’ mother got a job there and was able to get off the dole. “I used to wait outside the gate for her,” Thomas recalled last week. A few years later, Thomas was hired at the Lockheed plant and has worked there for 10 years.
But that could change in the months ahead, because Lockheed is weighing a decision to shut down the historically important plant. The company’s aircraft business is shrinking and the C-5 cargo plane program, which has supplied work for the plant in recent years, will come to an end this summer.
Amid political fervor and union pressure, Lockheed officials say they are exploring a range of options to keep the plant open or ameliorate the impact of a closing. If the plant is shut down, it will close the book on one of the few successful experiments by an aerospace company to intervene in a social cause.
Lockheed broke new ground in a number of ways in 1969 when it built the plant in the economically disadvantaged area of South-Central Los Angeles. The move was in response to calls for industry to make commitments to create jobs in the rundown neighborhood, which suffered from chronically high-unemployment. The investment was not an easy one to make.
“I had my own people take issue with me,” recalled A. Carl Kotchian, the now-retired president of Lockheed who pushed for a corporate commitment to the riot-torn neighborhood. “They said I was going to spend a lot of money and the place was going to be run down and there was going to be thievery and muggings at the plant. None of that came to pass.”
What did happen was that the plant became no better and no worse than other Lockheed plants in terms of productivity, efficiency, employee absenteeism and other key measures of performance, according to F. R. (Mac) McClelland, manager of the Lockheed Watts-Willowbrook plant, as it is known.
“A lot of guys here could work for Rockwell or Northrop,” McClelland said recently as he walked the factory floor amid the din of rivet guns and nut drivers. “I started out years ago as a (aircraft) structures mechanic, and these guys are good mechanics.”
Although the plant has become an important part of the economy in Watts, it is not large by aerospace industry standards. And employment is already slipping at the plant. It employs 180 workers, predominantly members of minorities, down from 240 last year, McClelland said. Lockheed canceled a second shift recently and laid off 20 workers. The company had 9,500 workers assigned nationwide to the C-5 program at its peak last year.
The plant assembles aluminum floor beams, bulkheads and wing torque boxes for the giant C-5 Galaxy cargo jet, representing only a small part the aircraft structure. Every 10 days, the plant ships these assemblies to Lockheed’s huge factory in Marietta, Ga., where the C-5 is put together.
By July or August, the last of the C-5 subassemblies will be gone and possibly all the workers, as well.
“The facts are that the C-5 work is running out, and there is nothing in the pipeline to put in there right now,” said H. David Crowther, Lockheed vice president for corporate communications and a moving force in setting up the plant in 1969. “We really don’t know. Common sense would say to shut it down in this restructuring process we are going through. But some of us want to hold back.”
One possible alternative Lockheed is exploring is to lease the plant to another contractor whose business is still strong. The possibilities are likely to include Douglas Aircraft and Northrop, the two Southern California aircraft producers who have growing operations.
Not a Charity Operation
But a lot of aircraft companies are saddled with excess and under-used factory capacity, and Lockheed may have a tough job interesting another company in the Watts plant, which does not offer any economic incentives.
The Watts-Willowbrook plant was structured from the start to be just like any other Lockheed plant, meaning that employees were represented by the International Assn. of Machinists and were given union-scale wages. “It was not a charity operation,” Crowther said.
Senior employees now earn nearly $15 an hour, among the highest wages in the area and among the highest in the aerospace industry.
The plant to this day is well maintained, and the large grove of Monterey pines that was planted around it form an oasis in the depressed, graffiti-scarred landscape of South-Central Los Angeles.
“I decided that if we were going to go down there, we were going to build a new plant and landscape it just like if we were going to put it in Woodland Hills,” Kotchian said. “I was always disappointed when companies would do something like this in an abandoned warehouse or a supermarket. My approach was that we should be a force for upgrading the community.”
The Lockheed plant is part of the small 52-acre Watts Industrial Park, which was originally proposed by Kotchian to the Economic Resources Council, a nonprofit group set up after the Watts riots. The industrial park failed to attract other major employers like Lockheed, but it did lease out its space successfully to a number of small companies.
Now, political and union leaders in the area are troubled by the likelihood of losing one of the few success stories to grow out of the Watts riots.
“More than just a symbol, that plant has helped stabilize that community,” said Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles) in an interview. “It has had a very positive image. It has certainly put Lockheed in a very favorable light.”
Discrimination Hearings
Nonetheless, Hawkins said he is dissatisfied with various options under consideration by Lockheed to close the plant. “We take a rather strong position that, in view of the contracts they have just received, they should have enough money to keep the plant open,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, has had its subcommittee on employment opportunities hold hearings looking into discrimination in the aerospace industry.
“We feel we should be increasing the representation of minorities, not decreasing their representation,” he said. “There has been very little progress made for blacks, Hispanics and women in this industry. What little progress there has been is in the lower-level jobs.”
The International Assn. of Machinists District 27, which represents Lockheed’s aircraft workers in the Los Angeles area, has also pressed the company for a commitment to the Watts plant.
“I would hope the corporation could some how feed work into Watts-Willowbrook so as to continue the economic boost still needed in South-Central Los Angeles,” union President Brian Carver wrote to Lockheed Chairman Lawrence Kitchen. “If there is anything this union can do to ensure permanency of production at Watts-Willowbrook we will be happy to do so.”
If Lockheed is forced to close the Watts plant, not all the workers there will lose their jobs, though. McClelland, the plant manager, said 34% of the workers will have enough seniority to bump other employees and get jobs at Lockheed’s Burbank, Palmdale or Rye Canyon plants. The union has a single seniority list for its facilities at Burbank, Palmdale, Rye Canyon and Watts.
But some of those people will be neither able nor willing to make the long commute, veteran employee Nathan Grace said last week. Grace, a structures mechanic at Watts for 18 years, has worked at Burbank before and does not look forward to the commute.
“Half of these people might not have a car to go to Burbank,” he said.
Clearances a Problem
And there are other problems with getting the Watts workers into the more military-oriented programs at Burbank.
Many of the Watts workers do not have security clearances to work in the top-secret plants at Burbank, and some may have difficulty getting clearances. Such clearances are based in part on an individual’s financial and residential stability.
That was one reason that Lockheed originally designated the Watts plant for commercial work on the L-1011 jetliner, Kotchian said. When the Lockheed ended production of the L-1011 in 1983, the plant was mothballed until the C-5 program started about a year later.
Grace is among those who will probably qualify for a job in Burbank, but he will have to renew his now-lapsed security clearance.
“I had a security clearance before I left Burbank the last time, but it’s a problem. My mother is deceased, and my wife’s mother is deceased,” he noted, indicating that the background investigation could be difficult.
Thomas, the mechanic who grew up across the street from the Lockheed plant, figures that he will not qualify for a job in Burbank. Even though he has been with Lockheed for 10 years, he spent four of those years on layoff and that does not count toward his seniority.
“A lot of this is going on during an election year,” Thomas said. “We feel that if (Vice President George) Bush gets elected . . . (President), we’ll have our jobs. He is going to follow (President) Reagan’s defense plan.”
