Western Digital, Rockwell Lay Off 280 O.C. Workers

The unemployment rolls in Orange County continue to grow as two local companies announced Monday the layoffs of about 280 local workers.

Western Digital Corp., a manufacturer of computer components, said it will lay off 160 employees, including 130 in Irvine, as a result of its continuing corporate restructuring and efforts to return to profitability.

And Rockwell International Corp. confirmed that it has laid off 200 employees in Southern California because of a corporate consolidation and completion of a defense contract. About 100 of those let go worked in Seal Beach and 50 in Anaheim.

The layoffs at Irvine-based Western Digital, a maker of computer components, are part of a continuing restructuring as the company tries to become more competitive. Since September, Western Digital has laid off 860 employees as part of that effort.

On Monday it laid off 130 non-manufacturing employees in Orange County and 30 more in San Jose and Santa Clara, said Robert Blair, spokesman for Western Digital.

“This is one of the steps we’re taking to improve our competitive position and reduce our overhead structure,” Blair said.

Western Digital has been caught in an ill-timed transition between technologies, with demand for its board-level computer products dropping much faster than it can bring its new products to market.

As a result, the company recently closed a plant in Puerto Rico and plans to take a writeoff of $60 million to $70 million for the quarter ended Dec. 31. The financial results for the quarter will be announced Friday, Blair said.

In addition, the company is restructuring its corporate staff from a loose collection of five separate business divisions to a single operating unit reporting to Kathryn A. Braun, who became executive vice president in a management shake-up in August.

The layoffs are also a reflection of the company’s change in strategy to focus more on sales of chips and components to computer manufacturers, known as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), instead of sales of board products to storefront dealers known as resellers.

“We’re moving to a leaner structure as we shift to OEM customers,” Blair said.

The company now has 7,100 employees, down about 600 from last September. While it has laid off 860 in that period, it has also hired about 260 manufacturing employees in Singapore and Northern California, Blair said.

Industry sources say that Western Digital also plans to raise cash by selling its networking products subsidiary--which has 75 employees and accounted for $92 million in sales in the fiscal year ended June 30, 1990--to competitor Standard Microsystems Corp. in Hauppage, N.Y. Blair declined to comment on that possibility.

Meanwhile, El Segundo-based Rockwell said it has dismissed 150 workers in Seal Beach and Downey. About two-thirds of those layoffs result from the elimination of the corporate staff for the Satellite and Space Electronics Division in Seal Beach earlier this month.

In addition, Rockwell’s Defense Electronics unit in Anaheim has laid off 50 manufacturing employees after the completion of a classified military contract, spokesman George Torres said.

As part of the consolidation, the satellite and space unit’s corporate staff will be dismantled and the unit will be combined largely with Rockwell’s Space Systems Division in Downey. About 100 workers are affected. The rest of the satellite and space division’s 1,400 employees will continue to work in Seal Beach.

The satellite and space unit’s primary work is building Global Positioning System navigational satellites. The unit is based in Seal Beach, where the company will move its corporate headquarters in 1992.

Rockwell announced two weeks ago that it would fold the satellite and space unit into other divisions to reduce overhead costs in the face of an expected downturn in the satellite business and military budget cutbacks. But at that time, Rockwell officials said there would be no immediate layoffs.

“We’ve gone through two weeks of looking at our requirements and realized that we had more than our requirement in some areas,” Rockwell spokeswoman Janet Dean said.

In addition, about 50 employees working on the construction of the Endeavour space shuttle project in Downey will be laid off as a result of the completion of the project, Dean said.