Workers Send SOS: Save Our Shipyard : Defense cuts: About 2,000 Long Beach Naval Shipyard employees protest possible closure.

Workers stood shoulder to shoulder with their bosses Wednesday as about 2,000 Long Beach Naval Shipyard employees poured into the streets in a noisy protest to save one of the city’s largest employers from the Pentagon’s ax.

“Hell no, we won’t go!” workers from 15 labor unions shouted, fists raised, as production came to a lunch-hour standstill at the 47-year-old yard--one of 100 military bases and installations targeted for closure last month by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

“Gorbachev don’t scare me; Dick Cheney scares me!,” Russ Buchan, a 47-year-old industrial engineer and technician of 14 years boomed as cars and trucks trundled past Gate No. 5 at Long Beach Harbor, their horns blaring in support.

The picket line swelled into one of the most massive demonstrations in the yard’s history, workers said, drawing 10 times the number who turned out to protest a cost-of-living raise last spring.

Several officials said scarcely a worker remained inside.

Shipyard executives, under a gag order imposed by the Defense Department, refused to comment on the demonstration. But several foremen picked up signs and joined the ranks in a rare moment of worker-management solidarity.

“If the workers don’t have their jobs, the managers don’t have their jobs,” said Steve Aguillar, a pipe fitter for 17 years and a third-generation shipyard employee. “The shipyard put food on our table when I was going to school and shoes on my feet. It’s doing the same for my children today.”

It is not unusual for sons and daughters to join their mothers and fathers on the docks and in the machine shops. Employees who have spent all their working lives at the yard say they face prolonged unemployment as the demand for specialized ship repair skills dwindles with the defense budget.

About 4,100 civilians stand to lose their jobs if the shipyard, for years the city’s second-largest employer, closes.

The yard recently slipped to third position--behind McDonnell Douglas Corp. and the city--after an efficiency campaign that reduced overhead while increasing productivity. That distinguished the shipyard as the only one of eight in the country to return to the Navy more than $20 million from jobs completed below cost.

That is precisely the reason employees are incensed. Why, they ask, should Cheney mark for closure the only yard to perform work under the cost of a bid?

“We’re working our tails off and we’re being told we’re going to get kicked in the butt for it,” pipe fitter Larry Finch fumed while a poster of a bloody ax bobbed above him.

Since Cheney released his so-called “hit list” of planned closures last month, union members have spent nights painting signs, stenciling T-shirts and calculating strategy. They planned to meet with several congressional aides today at Long Beach City Hall.

Production at the yard has accelerated, workers said, in an effort to push productivity so high that Washington would not dare shut it down. Some employees said they were working 12-hour days and one woman reported that she was doing three different jobs.

“We will make them look entirely stupid for wanting to close this shipyard,” Buchan vowed.

Any decision to close is subject to the approval of Congress. Although some officials have said it will be as long as two years before any installation is closed, workers fear the end is nearer.

“If after all we’re doing they still close us, hey, at least we put up a fight,” said Joanne McCaughey, a sheet metal mechanic who works at the yard to support her three children.