COLUMN ONE : Jobs Vanish --And May Not Return : Many industries appear to be shrinking permanently. Even when the recession ends, many firms won’t be rehiring.

To Frank Brazik and his fellow aerospace executives, the 1981-1982 recession was something they only read about. While tens of thousands of steel and auto workers were being thrown out of work in the Midwest, “it was bonanza time here in California,” Brazik recalls. “They were just hiring people off the street.”

This time, he is learning about economic problems firsthand. Laid off in August by McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, the 58-year-old Brazik says he has sent out hundreds of resumes, but has found “absolutely no takers” despite his 30 years of experience.

Brazik fears he is up against more than a temporary downturn. “There are so many projects that have gone away,” he says. “The jobs are just gone.”

Indeed, they may be gone forever. Economists say that is one reason this economic slump is different from past ones: Many of the jobs lost--particularly white collar ones--may not return even when the economy recovers.

“The 1981-1982 recession was more typical of previous ones. . . . ‘Laid off’ was the operative word,” says Audrey Freedman of the Conference Board, a New York-based business research organization. Now, she says, the fitting word for job loss is likely to be “terminated.”

What’s to blame? Economists cite ill-conceived business strategies of the 1980s, the mounting threat from leaner, more productive foreign competitors and tectonic shifts in the fundamentals of the American economy.

Communities’ most stable employers--banks and retail stores, for example--are taking a beating, with some suffering a recession and others nothing less than a depression. Many of these businesses, which weathered far worse downturns in the past, have simply vanished.

In virtually every big city’s heart stands an empty building or two that once held a thriving department store. Paying the price of massive overexpansion in the 1980s, retailing has lost 420,000 jobs since last summer. That figure is almost 30 times as great as the reduction during comparable stages of the 1981-1982 slump.

More than 60 substantial retailing firms went out of business last year, about triple the number of failures in 1988. “Very probably, the store that opens in the place of a Garfinckel’s or a B. Altman’s is not going to be the same full-service enterprise,” says Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, refering to two defunct East Coast chains.

Survival strategies in crippled industries also can mean fewer employees. Mergers are a case in point, most notably in banking.

When two banks combine to serve the same market, they can operate with only one branch on a busy street corner, not two. They can combine their data processing operations and eliminate duplication in management ranks.

NCNB Corp. and C&S;/Sovran Corp., merging to form NationsBank, believe they can shed 9,000 workers over the next three years and still become the biggest banking force in the South. Two weak New York banks, Chemical Bank and Manufacturers Hanover, expect to become one strong one--with 5,900 fewer employees and 70 fewer branches between them.

The same economics are driving the merger in California of BankAmerica Corp. and Security Pacific Corp., which by some estimates could cost 20,000 jobs.

Overall, the banking industry--already down by 260,000 from its mid-1980s peak--will enter the next century with 300,000 fewer employees than it has now, according to projections by McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm.

Especially hard hit will be clerical workers, who comprise more than half of the typical bank’s work force. Those jobs have been an important source of advancement for minorities and women.

Businesses, too, are paying the price for mergers in the 1980s that were financed with junk bonds--loading up on debt that carried crushing interest payments, particularly when the economy turned limp.

Now, what might have been only a normal downturn is proving fatal, or nearly so. The value of merged companies’ assets is suddenly less than the stated value of their debts. Many are slashing work forces just to survive, and even that may not be enough.

Roy Todd, a 34-year-old unemployed manager who lives in Simi Valley, worked for one such firm, in a microwave assembly division that was acquired by a heavily indebted competitor several years ago.

After four waves of cutbacks, the division’s ranks have shrunk to 50 from their original 170. Todd accepted a pay cut and a lesser job; finally, he lost even that job. “They can barely keep afloat paying the interest,” he says.

Now jobless for 11 weeks, his weekly unemployment benefit is about what he used to make in a single day. “Honestly, I don’t know if the recession had anything to do with my layoff. It had more to do with the way the company was run,” Todd says.

Healthy companies, too, are trimming management and technical ranks as they respond to intensifying international competition.

“To operate in the global economy requires being very lean, and that’s particularly true in the white-collar field and middle management,” says Barry Bluestone, a political economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

In engineering, for example, U.S. firms that once dominated world markets are feeling the heat from Japanese firms, which operate with lean organizations that rely more heavily on computer-assisted design techniques.

While the piping design work on a single major project might have employed squadrons of engineers for years a decade ago, that job can be done quickly these days by only a handful working on personal computers, says Neil Norman, past president of the National Society of Professional Engineers. “Many skilled or semi-skilled engineering duties just won’t be around any more.”

The additional pressures of a recession have accelerated the change. David Watts of Agoura Hills lost his job in October, when the computer peripherals firm for which he worked shrank his department by laying off almost one-third of the middle-management engineers.

“I really do think competition from Japan, and to a lesser extent the rest of Southeast Asia, is radically changing engineering in our country,” Watts says.

“Many of these jobs just won’t get re-created. The chances of my being able to find a job ideally suited to me--I’ve got long odds on that.” So at 51 years old, Watts is considering changing his field, possibly to marketing.

Even before the recession, U.S. companies were seeking to boost productivity to keep up with foreign competition. In part, they have turned to a Japanese-style management technique often called “total quality management.”

Giving workers more control over the final product, the idea is to build in quality rather than catch flaws through elaborate inspection procedures.

“In the process, it brings into question one of the major functions of middle management, which is to make sure the workers don’t cheat. The consequence is all those guys in the middle--the watchers and checkers--no longer are necessary,” says Robert Paulson, a McKinsey & Co. director in Los Angeles. “We celebrate competitiveness. We aspire to productivity. Therefore, we are throwing out the unproductive jobs and the people who are in them.”

That long-term trend, plus the overall shrinkage of the economy, is taking “a double hit on the middle managers,” Paulson says.

Finally, some industries face problems that are unique to them and probably won’t disappear when the economy improves.

The evaporation of the decades-old Soviet military threat, combined with pressure to reduce the federal deficit, will mean tougher times for defense contractors, regardless of how the economy fares.

In the commercial arena, meanwhile, aerospace firms are up against increasingly formidable foreign competition. As they seek to lower costs and strengthen ties with foreign buyers, more aerospace firms are parceling work overseas. Most notable recently is McDonnell Douglas’ intention to sell 40% of its Douglas Aircraft unit to a Taiwan firm--a $2-billion deal that would also allocate a big chunk of production work and jobs to the island nation.

In 1989, aerospace employed 1.33 million people. “That’s probably the peak we are going to see for a long time to come, and possibly ever,” says Virginia Lopez, executive director of the Aerospace Industries Assn.’s aerospace research center.

Last year, the industry lost 61,000 jobs, or 5% of its total work force, according to figures compiled by the association. The largest cuts were outside the production line, where scientists, engineers, technicians and administrative personnel felt a 6% reduction. In many companies, entire layers of management have been removed.

“In the management area, the downsizing may be most permanent,” Lopez says. “The strongly competitive nature of the industry means we are going to have to learn to manage with fewer people and do it better.”

Paulson predicts the aerospace industry ultimately will have a work force only 70% of its current size. “Three out of 10 workers will be out of the industry permanently,” with middle managers seeing the greatest share of the cuts, he says.

Other trends also suggest that when the economy starts to recover, companies will still be reluctant to bring in new workers.

With the costs of health insurance and other fringe benefits soaring, many firms are finding it far more profitable to add hours rather than people, says Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Janet Norwood.

“It is easier to extend the work hours and pay overtime than it is to hire new workers and incur the additional cost,” Norwood explains. And while that may prove to be a bonanza for people who already have jobs, it gives less hope to those who are out of work.

In addition, more companies are contracting out more of their work. That has white-collar and technical workers turning to self-employment through consulting and free-lancing.

Many workers find such arrangements attractive because they offer flexibility that full-time, salaried work does not. For others, self-employment may be the only option available. Regardless of how workers feel about such arrangements, they carry significant costs. They do not guarantee a stable income and they require the worker to foot the costs of his or her own fringe benefits.

“You have a kind of sea change in the way people’s working relationships are carried on. They are no longer fixed relationships with one employer,” the Conference Board’s Freedman explains. “Now, it’s really people working to cobble together a piece of income. . . . They’re hustling, in other words.”

C. James Weaver of Westlake Village had risen quickly through the banking and financial services industry, holding positions that included president of BancAmerica Acceptance Corp., a Bank of America auto-leasing subsidiary, and a Security Pacific vice president and product manager.

When he lost his position at an independent leasing company in August, 1990, he easily managed to find two consulting jobs with other financial institutions. But those contracts ran out in October, and now he has discovered that his consulting work has left him ineligible for unemployment compensation.

Never before had he been jobless for more than five days. Now, at 54, he worries about how he will keep his 4-year-old daughter fed and clothed. “Right now, I’m scrambling, trying to find anything and everything,” Weaver says. “I’m either overqualified or I’m overpaid or I don’t have the experience.”

Ultimately, Weaver believes that a sales job may be “the only thing that’s probably going to be left to me,” but he notes that it will probably mean a substantial pay cut.

Most of these long-term changes are hitting service industries hardest.

Manufacturing has proved more resilient because of changes it made during a series of difficult periods beginning with the 1973 recession. It learned to produce more with fewer people.

Now, these traditionally recession-prone industries are actually seeing far fewer layoffs than in the early 1980s, and many forecasters believe they will spring back more quickly.

Since the recession began in July of last year, job losses in manufacturing have reached 480,000, or 4.1% of the total factory work force, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. That’s a lot of jobs, but far less than these industries suffered during the first 15 months of the 1981-1982 downturn when job losses totaled a staggering 2.1 million, or 10.3% of the factory work force.

Finance, insurance and real estate--industries that are lumped together as a single category in government statistics--fared quite well during the first 15 months of the previous recession: They actually gained 41,000 new jobs. This time, employment has dropped by 50,000. That figure will certainly soar in coming months as a number of big bank mergers take place.

“Manufacturing, for the most part, kind of shook out the trees,” says William Spriggs, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.

In other industries, Spriggs says, “this is the beginning of a big consolidation which may continue for some time.”

HOLIDAY LAYOFFS: Employers no longer reluctant to lay off workers during holidays. D1