Ex-Rockwell Workers Speak Out at Meeting : Aerospace: In a rare confrontation, several laid-off employees publicly vent their frustrations at top management.
Sixteen months after he lost his job at Rockwell International Corp.’s Microelectronics Technology Center in Newport Beach, Randy Morse is still unemployed. On Wednesday, he got a chance to give his old boss a piece of his mind.
The Irvine resident, a chip manufacturing manager terminated during a company consolidation, expressed his frustration to Donald R. Beall, chairman of the $12-billion company that has shed thousands of workers in Southern California since 1985.
“I think your intentions are good,” Morse said at Rockwell’s crowded annual meeting in a hotel ballroom in El Segundo. “I’m frustrated like other unemployed people. I used to be proud pointing out Rockwell to my son when we drove by the plant. I can’t say that anymore.”
Morse was one of several laid-off workers who publicly vented their frustrations at top management of the aerospace and technology company, which moved its corporate headquarters to Seal Beach in December. The scene was a rare confrontation between anguished workers and the executives who authorize painful cuts in an era of recession and defense cutbacks.
Beall suggested that Morse, who worked for Rockwell for seven years, submit his resume to the company and speak with the company’s top human resources executive about job opportunities. But after the annual meeting, the 40-year-old Morse said he wasn’t optimistic.
Earlier in his address to shareholders, Beall said: “Knowing that any Rockwell employee will lose his or her job is of deep personal concern to me and to your entire management team, especially in a labor market such as today.”
Beall said hundreds of layoffs in Anaheim and Palmdale related to the cancellation of the Midgetman nuclear missile and a slowdown in work for National Aeronautics and Space Administration would proceed as announced.
In the past seven years, Rockwell has cut more than 36,000 jobs, largely because of the completion of the B-1B bomber program and continuous restructuring. The chairman said the company’s future employment outlook depends on economic recovery.
Beall said the company’s core markets--defense, electronics, factory automation, commercial aircraft equipment, newspaper printing presses and automotive parts--remain weak because of a worldwide recession. For the first quarter ended Dec. 31, the company reported that its earnings fell 13% to $123 million on revenue of $2.6 billion, also down 13%.
Beall said he hopes that a recovery can begin in the second half of the year. After the meeting, he said he wasn’t surprised by Bush’s State of the Union proposals to stimulate the economy. He said that, while proposals aimed at improving business investment are welcome, he didn’t think a turnaround would come until consumers begin buying goods again.
In the formal portion of the meeting, Rockwell’s board declared regular quarterly dividends on its various classes of stock.
Rockwell’s board considered a shareholder proposal that the company abandon its defense business, which accounted for about $3 billion in annual revenue last year, and convert to commercial work. After criticizing the company’s decision to pursue development of the Navy’s next generation AX fighter, Mary Anne Vincent, spokeswoman for the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility in New York, withdrew the proposal.
Beall defended the decision last November to join Calabasas-based Lockheed Corp. in a bid for AX contracts, saying that he believed the plane was a viable defense project that presented a good business opportunity for Rockwell.
Another worker said a group of terminated employees who call themselves the Rockwell Discards meet often at a restaurant to express their frustrations. He invited Beall to attend.
Beall did not comment on the invitation, but said: “I’m sorry you lost your job.”
