It’s Back to the Water Cooler at McDonnell
Computers used by an estimated 22,000 McDonnell Douglas workers in Long Beach to communicate with each other are being turned off today.
The extraordinary move--some employees say a drastic and even a desperate one--is just the latest effort by the company to meet a goal mandated by McDonnell Douglas Chairman John McDonnell to save $700 million annually.
“These are times that call for drastic measures,” said Douglas Aircraft spokesman Don Hanson, acknowledging reports of the decision from sources inside the plant. “We are talking about saving $700 million across the corporation. That is a very big number.”
Ironically, employees were notified of the decision by a message sent on the very computer system that is to be decommissioned. “The McDonnell Douglas executive council has decided to eliminate all electronic mail throughout the corporation,” the announcement said.
The computer system, made by International Business Machines, is known as PROFS or “professional office system.” It is used by employees to send and receive messages electronically, keep daily schedules, compose letters or memos and many other functions.
Employees are either outraged or frightened by the the decision. “People are saying why don’t you get rid of the telephones,” said one professional employee.
When word first began to circulate on June 27 about a possible decision to shut down the system, 908 responses were sent to the management information center. Of those, 905 were opposed to the move, a source said.
Without PROFs, employees will either have to place telephone calls or use interoffice mail. But one employee noted that the company mail room is weeks behind in distributing mail.
Hanson acknowledged that the mail room was running behind schedule as a result of cost-cutting layoffs in the mail room staff.
But mail deliveries are improving. The company recently was forced, however, to cut deliveries and pickups from a frequency of twice each day to only once each day, another indication of the severity of the financial condition of the company.
“It really does bring it home to you,” Hanson said about the difficulties of the cost-cutting effort.
In addition, a range of other plant services are being cut, such as the bus service that shuttles employees around the plant. More seriously, the staff that keeps plant machinery operating is also being trimmed, according to one management source.
“They say we are just keeping the direct production people,” the source said. “They don’t seem to understand that if their machines are not operating, it is going to be difficult to keep production going.”
Another internal source at Douglas said the company has 30,000 terminals in Long Beach alone that are tied into the PROFs system. Other terminals link Long Beach to such far-flung Douglas facilities as Cypress, Monrovia and Torrance.
Indeed, a key concern of many employees is that Douglas is so spread out that without an electronic message system, communications will suffer. For example, production of the Air Force C-17 cargo jet is on the west side of the Long Beach airport, but the program’s engineering staff is about two miles away on the east side of the airport. The executive staff is about a mile north of that building.
It is unclear just how much money the elimination of PROFs is supposed to save. It is operated by four mainframe computers. A source said the company ultimately might remove some PROFs terminals and eliminate some of the mainframes.
