Navy Laying Off Its Civilian Inspectors

In what is expected to become an increasingly familiar consequence of U.S. defense budget cuts, the Navy’s Western regional Engineering Command will lay off its civilian construction inspection force Tuesday on the grounds that construction on naval bases is sagging and expected to decrease further.

Approximately 123 “construction representatives,” who act as watchdogs over private contractors hired by the Navy in nine Western states, will lose their jobs. About 20 more accepted early retirement offers before the effective date of the layoffs.

The National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents the inspectors, called the layoffs short-sighted and said they will cost the Navy more in contractor fraud than they will save in reduced payroll.

Both the Navy and Army have long been criticized for failing to adequately oversee the private contractors they hire. A 1985 General Accounting Office audit said new military facilities built for the two services were being accepted despite serious flaws, in part because the contractors building them were allowed to inspect their own work.

Contractors on projects costing $2 million or more are required to hire their own “quality control” supervisor. Until now, smaller projects have been under the eye of the construction representatives.

The GAO audit said the Army and Navy were doing little to ensure that the inspectors on the contractor’s payroll enforced design and quality standards. It also said that the two branches “did not support their own inspectors in dealings with the contractors,” a complaint that the construction representatives’ union says still is widespread.

John MacDonald, president of the Southern California chapter of the union that represents the construction representatives, said the layoffs will leave “the fox guarding the hen house.”

A Navy spokesman said the oversight responsibilities of the construction representatives will be filled by hiring 33 civilian “engineering technicians.” Some of these positions will be filled by laid-off construction representatives. However, the duties of the technicians will involve more contract bookkeeping and less in-the-field inspection than the construction representatives had done.

Paul Finn, financial secretary of Local 333 of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades in La Mesa, said he is worried that the layoffs will lead to increased violations by contractors of the federal Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors on military bases to pay workers at prevailing local rates.

A construction representative who works at one Southern California naval base, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said contractors sometimes defraud the military by lying about the wages they pay their workers.

“You’ll have people being paid $6, $7 an hour while the books show they’re being paid $24 an hour,” he said. “I’ve had this happen 20 times.”

The representative said his colleagues are the only liaison between naval construction engineers, who they say tend to be inexperienced, and the contractors.

The Navy formally announced the layoffs two months ago to comply with the year-old federal plant closing-notification law, which requires that workers receive 60 days’ notice.

The layoffs, ordered by the Western division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, covers bases from Southern California to Alaska but does not affect San Diego, which is in a different division. No similar layoffs have yet been ordered by other divisions of the Engineering Command.