Laid-Off Lockheed Workers Are Forced to Face the ‘Real World’
Lockheed’s decision this year to dramatically curtail operations in Burbank is bringing an end to a prosperous age for thousands of aerospace workers who earned a good living bolting together masterpieces of destruction.
Former workers in the secret Lockheed division that built the radar-eluding Stealth Fighter are having to learn to look for jobs in what they sardonically call “the real world,” where stenographers aren’t paid $31,000 a year.
That realization was evident in the faces of displaced workers recently filing into the federally sponsored Verdugo Job Center, which is helping the aerospace workers find new careers. The center is located in the once-bustling Machinists Union hall on Victory Boulevard in Burbank, where layoffs have shrunk the 11 union locals to just two, leaving plenty of room for counselors trying to help people such as Ted Moss.
Balding and quiet, Moss, 38, carried a plastic bag full of awards, mementos from a job well done but no guarantee of a future that will allow him even to buy a decent used car for a daughter headed off to college.
Doug Dong had a decade of experience in the secret Skunk Works that built the Stealth Fighter but needed help deciding what to put on his resume.
Alice Ford, 59, fidgeted during her counseling session. Having narrowly survived two previous layoffs, she was expecting to be bumped from her stenographer’s job any day. She summed up the fears about the future that many of the workers felt.
“I don’t know if they’re trying to give me a heart attack,” she said of the company’s management, laughing nervously.
Conversations in the bars and half-filled luncheonettes near the Lockheed plant reflected a growing sense that a special era, when Southern California reigned supreme in the aerospace industry, had reached a turning point. “Burbank is drying up,” said one former employee.
By the time Lockheed Corp.’s restructuring is complete, last year’s work force of 13,000 will be reduced to as few as 2,000, company spokesman James Ragsdale said. A thousand jobs are going to Marietta, Ga., the new headquarters of Lockheed’s aeronautical systems division, while an unspecified number are being transferred to the Palmdale plant, where advanced weapons will be built. Half a dozen buildings, housing the administrative offices of the advanced division, will be all that is left of Lockheed’s 320-acre Burbank plant.
Ragsdale blamed the cutbacks on several factors. The company has completed work on four major contracts, including the Stealth fighter and the P3 sub-chaser that the Navy had been ordering since 1962. At the same time, the defense industry as a whole has slowed down dramatically. He said he had heard that industrywide, Southern California may lose 20,000 aerospace jobs.
As a result, the company decided to close the Burbank plant, which had been in operation since 1928 and was its oldest. But while the jobs are leaving, most of the workers are staying, too old or too settled to pack up and move across country. Many were not even offered the chance to move to take new jobs with the company.
So those left behind are learning to change their lifestyles and cut back on expenses, scrimping and saving on restaurant meals and putting off large purchases.
Moss, of Los Angeles, who made parts for airplanes and missiles for 20 years, was laid off Feb. 2. He tried to get a job with competing Northrop Corp. in Pico Rivera, but met a job freeze. So for now, he makes do with a $190-a-week unemployment check, which doesn’t go very far compared to the $617 a week he used to make.
“You have to tighten up,” he said. “As far as recreation goes, I don’t do too much of anything. I go to the park because it doesn’t cost much, except gas money.”
He’s not a homeowner, so he isn’t facing a big monthly mortgage. However, his daughter is going off to college to become a lawyer and needs a car. He would like to buy one for her but can’t do it now. “I told her I want to help her out. But I’ve got to go back to work.”
So he went to the Verdugo Job Center looking for tips.
New arrivals at the center, sponsored by the Verdugo Private Industry Council, attend a one-day group workshop on modern job-hunting skills that have surprisingly little to do with scanning the want ads. “Most people find jobs through networking,” says George Enoch, manager of the jobs center. The next visit is for private counseling and advice on constructing a compelling resume.
Ford was still on the job as a stenographer and she dropped in during a break, her ID badge still clipped to her sweater.
“We will be helping you focus on your job wants and develop ways to sell yourself convincingly,” said her counselor, Bill White. “We’re going to video you, and at the next session we will develop a reference list.”
That taken care of, he wanted to know how she was holding up. “How do you feel? Depressed? If you’re angry or depressed you can’t go out and find a job.”
“I’m fearful,” she said. “I’m not 25 years old anymore. Yet I have to work.”
He nods, asks her salary. “I make $14.28 an hour,” she replied, sheepishly. “I would like to make the same but I’m not convinced I will.”
It was a familiar refrain, but White counseled against self-defeating attitudes. “What is the magic sentence?”
“I’m willing to consider it?” she said hesitantly.
He smiled. “Right. Then you come back here and we’ll teach you to negotiate” to get more money.
White said later that Ford, who felt her layoff was imminent, was typical of displaced workers. “They go through the whole grief cycle. Anger and shock, denial, depression, then acceptance.” The counselors watch for any worker that is too upset and, if so, steer him or her to a therapist.
While union activists say they are still trying to persuade the company to stay, Braxton Berkley, one of those on the International Assn. of Machinists Committee to Save Jobs, is one of many Lockheed workers who have taken lower-paying jobs with Continental Air Lines. “A lot of people from Lockheed are out there now. The problem there is, you can’t go to work for $9 an hour once you made $14,” he said.
If there are stages in the healing process, Darlene New, 43, is still in the anger phase. She is angry at Lockheed and at her supervisors for letting her go. And for the way it was done. On June 29, she was publicly called into the manager’s office and informed that she would be leaving her $39,000-a-year job in Advanced Development Projects, she said. She burst into tears of humiliation.
“I’ve never been laid off from any job,” she said. “You feel, ‘Oh, God, didn’t I do the job well?’ ”
It was especially devastating because she was not at all prepared for it. Having had a top-secret clearance, she was sure she would survive any layoffs. “I thought I would be at Lockheed for the rest of my life. It is like part of you is gone.”
Though her husband also works at Lockheed, the family needed her paycheck to help pay the mortgage on their 2 1/2-acre ranch in quiet Leona Valley near Palmdale. So instead of filing for unemployment, she went right out and found a job selling BMWs in Lancaster. It wasn’t a good time, or place, to sell high-priced, sporty cars. In a month, she sold only two cars and quit.
The family has withdrawn money from savings to pay bills and the money her two sons earned by selling their 4-H animals at the Antelope Valley Fair was used to buy school clothes. New recently found a second job that pays 40% less than what she made at Lockheed.
She was disappointed by the lower wage but realized that she had had it pretty good for a long time. “We were all overpaid, I feel. Out in what we now call the real world, people don’t make that kind of money.”
