Layoffs or Long Commutes Loom
When Northrop Corp. announced the closure of its Newbury Park plant, it was a doubly bad blow for the Mongeon family.
Darlene Mongeon, 53, opened a small deli near Northrop more than three years ago to cater to the bustling lunchtime crowd. But the business, her only source of income, could drop by almost a third when the plant closes by the end of 1991, she said.
And Mongeon’s 30-year-old son, who works at Northrop, will be transferred or laid off when the plant closes in June.
“It’s going to be a rough time,” she said. “It’s going to hurt.”
Northrop workers are still grappling with the reality that they will be laid off or transferred to plants in Hawthorne or Pico Rivera. The closure affects 1,800 workers at the Newbury Park plant. About 1,000 are to be transferred to Pico Rivera and Hawthorne.
About 400 workers from Newbury Park are to receive layoff notices next year. Officials expect that another 400 Newbury Park workers faced with a transfer may seek to retire or leave on their own.
Don Mongeon, who has conducted X-ray and ultrasonic testing at Northrop for nine years, tried to sell his three-bedroom house in Thousand Oaks before the plant closure was announced. But the real estate market has been so bad that his house remains unsold after six months.
“The worst thing about it is, it’s the worst time of year” to sell a house, said Mongeon, who has three children.
“It’s really tough right now,” he said. “It’s going to be a grim Christmas.”
Lawrence Horner, a Northrop vice president and Thousand Oaks city councilman, said he expects many top Northrop managers to stay in Thousand Oaks and commute two or three hours a day to Los Angeles.
Horner, who has lived in Thousand Oaks for 22 years, already commutes to Hawthorne two to three days a week from a home in the North Ranch area of Thousand Oaks.
Northrop has pledged to provide some relocation assistance, including temporary housing, based on the number of years an employee has worked at the company, officials said. But the company has refused to elaborate on how much assistance workers will be given. Northrop already has offered to bus workers to Pico Rivera or Hawthorne.
Philip Fernandes, president of the Northrop Ventura Employees Union, predicted that many of the 800 hourly workers the union represents will turn down any offer of jobs at the company’s other plants and seek aerospace jobs in Seattle, Wash., where The Boeing Co. is based.
Some workers are fearful that a move to the other Northrop plants might put them in communities with high crime rates, gangs and more traffic congestion, he said.
The Newbury Park plant is known at the other Northrop facilities as “The Country Club,” Fernandes said.
Other workers are wondering how to uproot children from their schools and spouses from jobs. Four days before her nine-year anniversary at Northrop, 32-year-old Lynda Daily got the news that she could be laid off or transferred.
Although she has no house to sell, Daily is worried about how a move would affect her children.
If she and others decide to stay in the area and have to leave their homes before dawn to drive to the other facilities, they would have to find new day-care arrangements, Daily said.
“What am I going to do with my little girl?” she said. “Nobody’s going to want to take a child at 4:30 in the morning.”
Daily said she is also afraid that the job she has been promised will not materialize.
“I’m scared. I really don’t want to go down to Pico Rivera,” she said. “But I’m hoping and praying I have a job to go to.”
