Workers’ Way of Life Sinks With San Pedro Shipyard
At the vast Todd Shipyards complex in San Pedro, Barry Pettyjohn works in virtual solitude.
It has not always been this way. Just seven years ago, Pettyjohn, a marine machinist foreman, supervised 180 people--175 more than work for him today. Back then, nearly 6,000 workers--riggers, pipe fitters, painters, machinists, welders and electricians--jammed the 112-acre facility, where they churned out guided-missile frigates under a massive peacetime buildup of this country’s naval fleet. Todd was a noisy place in those days, alive with the clinking and grinding of ships coming to life.
Today, Todd is quiet.
There are no ships being built anymore. The final frigate was delivered to the Navy on Friday, the same day that Pettyjohn and the remaining 400 workers got the bad news: The company’s board of directors has voted to shut down the San Pedro yard for good.
The decision means more than the loss of jobs. It means the loss of a way of life for generations of shipbuilders in the close-knit community at the southern tip of Los Angeles, where shipyard work has been handed down from grandfather to father to son since World War I.
Said Pettyjohn, who followed in his father-in-law’s footsteps at Todd and who wanted his son to do the same: “This is something that I always hoped to be able to pass on to him, because shipyard people, they’re the best people in the world. It’s something that I always felt I was going to be able to do, to carry on the tradition.”
There are so many fathers and sons working side by side in the shipyard that about a decade ago, the company adopted a nepotism policy barring supervisors from hiring their relatives into their own shops. The employees got around the ban, Pettyjohn said, by implementing a sort of pork-barrel system in which a welder might hire the son of a coppersmith in exchange for a return of the favor.
Company officials--many of them the children of Todd employees as well--apparently didn’t mind.
“My father got a job here during World War II and worked here until he died in the 1960s,” said John O’Hara, who joined Todd as a forklift driver in 1950 and is now vice president for industrial relations. “My mother worked here during the war. My brother worked here for a period of time. My wife worked here, all three of my sons worked here. Everyone in our family has worked at Todd at one time or another. I think there’s been an O’Hara in the shipyard since 1941.
“It’s an institution in San Pedro,” O’Hara continued. “I doubt if there’s anyone in San Pedro who’s lived there any length of time who doesn’t either have a friend or relative or knows someone who has worked for Todd at one time or has worked there themselves.”
Indeed, Todd’s history in San Pedro runs deep. The vast shipyard, which sits under the shadow of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, was established in 1917 as the Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Corp. At that time, four shipbuilding companies in Los Angeles Harbor employed 20,000 people to build both steel and wooden vessels for the war effort.
By World War II, Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Dry Dock was unable to cope with the crush of shipbuilding work. The Navy requisitioned it in December, 1943, and turned its management over to Todd, a company that was founded in 1916 but takes pride in tracing its roots to the mid-1800s, when its forerunner built the Civil War ship Monitor. Todd built or repaired 960 ships in San Pedro during World War II and bought the yard in 1945.
Slump in 1970s
As is common in the shipbuilding industry, business waxed and waned over the decades, becoming especially slow during the 1970s. But by the early 1980s, Todd was again flourishing under the Reagan Administration’s buildup of the Navy from 450 to 600 ships. Todd’s Los Angeles division built 18 guided-missile frigates for the Navy, the last of which--the Ingraham--was delivered last week. That contract kept the San Pedro yard swamped with work.
More recently, Todd-San Pedro has been unable to compete for Navy contracts against lower-paying East Coast shipyards and has, like other American yards, been shut out of the commercial shipbuilding business by foreign competitors. In August, 1987, Todd’s parent company, Todd Shipyards Corp. of Jersey City, N.J., filed for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code.
There have been massive layoffs at the San Pedro yard since then. What once felt like a throbbing little city--with its own fire department, medical clinic, security patrol and bicycles and golf carts for transportation--now feels “like a cemetery,” complained sheet metal worker Francisco Martinez.
Only workers like Martinez--those with the most seniority, and hence, the most attachment--remain at Todd these days. Most will work their last day July 21, although some, particularly top management, expect to remain at the yard through the end of the year.
For these employees, the decline of the once-bustling yard has been especially painful. Even those who don’t have family at Todd talk about it as though they do.
“There is something here, it was a friendship,” said Martinez, a 15-year employee. “It’s part of a family. You are a member of that family. The situation right now is very sad. I’ve seen a lot of people--great people--go, and they are gone for good.”
Like Family Breakup
“It’s almost like having your mother and father die and seeing your brother and sister go separate ways,” said Mike Matelyan, a 14-year employee who is moving his wife and young son to Seattle in search of work at Todd’s shipyard there. “A lot of us that are left have been loyal for so long. The ones that are left now are the ones that made the decision to go down with the ship.”
Unless they move to Seattle or some other part of the country--or unless Todd is able to persuade a new owner to buy or lease its assets and take over the San Pedro yard--there is little hope for Todd employees who want to continue in shipyard work. There are no shipbuilders left in Los Angeles Harbor, although there are a handful of smaller yards that do repair work.
Some of the laid-off employees, who earned a maximum $13.48 an hour at Todd, have been able to find new jobs at similar rates of pay, particularly if they have skills that can be transferred to oil refineries, or in Southern California’s booming aerospace industry. Others, like welder Frank Montgomery, have not.
Montgomery, who worked at Todd for more than 17 years, was laid off in February. He now spends his days going from union to union --shipbuilders, machinists, iron workers and pile drivers--in search of work. He says he has had little luck, even though he recently went back to school to obtain a special certification in his field.
“You work all these years and then you find yourself, at this age, out of a job,” said Montgomery, 46. “So you go back to school to try to start all over again and here . . . I’m running into a stone wall.”
Not the Same
Yet many of those who have had success finding jobs in other industries say their heart is not in it. Shipbuilding is in their blood. They say there is nothing quite like watching a destroyer or a frigate rise up from nothing, seeing the bottle of champagne smashed across its bow and watching its progress as it goes on to defend the nation. That, says 33-year employee Tom O’Toole, assistant general manager at the San Pedro yard, cannot compare to “screwing a little chrome bolt on a 747.”
Says O’Hara, the company vice president: “I think emotionally a lot of people are very attached, albeit they don’t all admit it. There’s a lot of pride in the work that they do. You built this thing, you’ve seen the sections carried to the ways and it just forms almost daily before your eyes, and when you have the actual launching before the crowds, with the banners and the flags and the ship going down the ways as the horns toot and the Navy band plays ‘Anchors Aweigh’ . . . it’s just a helluva experience.
“That’s one of the hard things, to walk away from this industry into something else. Maybe it pays as well. Hell, maybe it’s even steadier, but there’s something kind of colorful and salty about working in a shipyard.”
