Weiser Lock Helps to Secure New Jobs : Employment: The firm will have laid off 1,000 employees by June, but it is running a successful placement campaign to get them work with other Southland companies.
The layoffs began in earnest a little more than a year ago, and when they end in late May, Weiser Lock Co. will have let go more than 1,100 workers.
But thanks to what is one of the largest and most aggressive job placement campaigns in the Southland, a large number of those people will have gone from Weiser to new jobs instead of to the local unemployment office.
To date, the company has posted an impressive 94% success rate in helping laid-off employees find new jobs.
The big crunch, however, is between now and the end of May, when Weiser--once the second-largest employer in Huntington Beach and one of the top 100 employers in the county--lays off its last 300 people. The company announced 18 months ago that it would close its Huntington Beach plant by June, 1990, and reopen with a slimmed-down staff in a automated facility in Tucson, Ariz.
Most of the remaining 300 are in lower-skilled assembly and shipping jobs--the kind of work that is harder to get because the competition for it is greater, says Janice Meyers, the employment consultant Weiser hired nearly 18 months ago to put together its outplacement program.
But Meyers and Ron Spencer, Weiser’s personnel director, say they and the company are determined to do all they can to line up jobs for the remaining employees.
They get good marks for their efforts so far from current and former Weiser employees.
Weiser has, for instance, given each employee to be terminated a minimum of 60 days’ notice--and the company began this practice before a federal law requiring such notice took effect last year.
The company also gives its hourly employees a severance package that includes four days’ pay for each year at Weiser. Employees had been with the company an average of 11 years, which works out to 14 weeks’ pay or $6,800 per worker--for a total of about $4.7 million.
The long tenure of its workers was one of Weiser’s strengths--and also one of its weaknesses. The company, founded in South Gate in 1904, had always encouraged the sons and daughters of its full-time employees to take summer jobs during their school years, and many went directly from high school to work at Weiser.
Entire clans--husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, daughters and cousins--were Weiser employees. And because Weiser tended to pay better than other non-union manufacturing companies, they stayed.
Most employees at the company, therefore, were paid well above the company’s beginning scale, had three and four weeks’ annual paid vacation, lots of accrued sick leave. In addition, as the work force aged, the company’s insurance premiums went up and up with the higher medical bills.
By the late 1980s, the rising costs of raw materials and the competition from foreign-made locks started eating into Weiser’s profits. Its share of the $500-million annual U.S. lock market slipped from 30% in the late 1970s to 22% in 1988. Weiser finally decided that it could no longer afford to continue its manufacturing operation in Orange County, where it had moved in 1978.
The August, 1988, announcement that the company would shut its doors caught most employees by surprise.
“They gave us a lot of time, a lot of advance warning and a lot of help,” said Pat Hargrove of Huntington Beach, an eight-year Weiser employee.
Hargrove was laid off a year ago. Through Weiser’s outplacement effort, she got a job three months later at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co.
When she learned of the plant closing 18 months ago, Hargrove said, she feared she did not know how to go about finding another job. “But they had Jan there full time, and she was wonderful,” Hargrove said of Meyers. “She assisted in writing resumes, and I had no idea how to do that! And they gave us refresher courses and math and lessons in filling out job applications; they even gave us practice tests so we would know what to expect if we applied for jobs at companies that had employment tests.”
In most cases, the counseling, test-taking, resume writing and other work was done on Weiser’s time. The company even arranged for prospective employers to come to Weiser to conduct interviews whenever possible.
A major part of the outplacement effort has been to find employers, primarily in Orange and Los Angeles counties, willing to interview Weiser workers. To help in that process, Meyers and Spencer have been calling employers directly rather than leaving it up to the individual employees to make the calls. “It makes a tremendous difference, talking employer to employer rather than having the job seeker calling cold,” Spencer said. It also gave the Weiser officials a chance to sing the praises of their workers and to discuss their skills directly rather than through stiff, formal letters of recommendation. Hargrove, who assembled locks, was one Weiser employee to get a new job this way.
“At McDonnell Douglas,” Hargrove said, “I’m putting together the wheel well of a jet . . . . It is working out well. They gave me the confidence in the outplacement program to believe in myself.”
Another former Weiser employee who speaks highly of the company’s placement efforts is Everett Conley. Conley, a foreman in the manufacturing operations department, was 38 years old and a 17-year Weiser veteran when his layoff date rolled around.
“They gave me 60 days’ notice, and I still had four weeks to go when they called me in and said they’d arranged an interview,” Conley said. “I had a new job before I left Weiser.”
His new job is at National Package Sealing Co. in Anaheim, a 10-employee shop that manufactures a heavy-duty package taping machine. Conley said his official title is operations supervisor, “which makes me the owner’s right-hand man.”
As the closing date nears, Weiser is taking out advertisements in local papers to tell other employers that a large number of trained workers are available.
Meyers--who has counted Weiser as the only client of her Downey-based consulting firm, Meyers & Associates, for the past year and a half--is shifting into high gear.
“This is something that a company doesn’t have to do,” Spencer said, “but we have always believed that our employees give us their time and their talent and we owe them more than a paycheck.
