Peace Fallout : Aerospace Workers Become Victims of Cold War’s End as Industry Keeps Laying Off
The end of the Cold War is turning Kevin Sifferman’s future upside-down.
A Lockheed employee since 1978, Sifferman planned to stay at the defense contractor for the next 20 years until he could collect full retirement benefits, just like his father. But now the burly, 35-year-old plumber doesn’t expect to last out the year--much less the next two decades.
Defense spending cutbacks are about to catch up with him. “You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise,” Sifferman said. “It’s going to come.”
Americans’ hopes are high that an era of peace is breaking out around the world. The Soviet Union, the nation’s main nemesis since World War II, has collapsed. Last year’s Persian Gulf War is fading into memory.
Eventually, Southern California--where the aerospace industry is by far the biggest manufacturing employer--may reap the benefits of a “peace dividend.” Conceivably, money diverted from defense could foster new high-tech civilian industries.
But for now, peace means that the jobs of thousands of aerospace and defense workers--people who take credit for helping their country face down the communist bloc--are soon to disappear, if they aren’t gone already.
“We did too good of a job,” the raspy-voiced Sifferman said with a laugh.
Once part of a thriving field, many of those who survived previous rounds of job cuts now live in fear that their jobs will be the next to get chopped.
Worries extend from the production lines to executive offices but probably strike hardest at people with limited or specialized skills used rarely outside of aerospace and defense, including scientists, jet engine mechanics and contract administrators.
Nervous blue-collar workers, steadily edging closer to the layoff list, are already being bumped into lesser positions. Executives draw up “downsizing” plans knowing that one of these days they may be pushed out the door along with their staff members.
“The world is changing at a pace that is so rapid, and there’s so much uncertainty, it’s tough to know when this is going to end,” said Rod Hanks, vice president of human resources for HR Textron in Valencia, which makes flight controls. “It’s almost like a bullet has been fired, and you hope you’re out of its path.”
Some workers are frozen in denial. In other cases, longtime colleagues are turning on one another. Young union workers, for example, bad-mouth older hands who stay on the job instead of retiring to save positions for employees with less seniority.
Tensions have also been stirred among people in related commercial fields.
“We’re flooded with (job applications from) engineers with higher degrees than I have, and they’re willing to come to work for $5,000 less than I make,” said Ellery Mitchell, a $37,000-a-year field engineer with a unit of Magnavox in Torrance that sells satellite communications and navigation systems. “Anybody can be replaced easily. Just the thought of that is stressful.”
The aerospace and defense industry has always been volatile; it last went into a severe nose-dive when Vietnam War spending wound down in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But in terms of job losses, some analysts predict, this aerospace downturn will turn out to be the state’s worst ever.
Cuts in government spending on defense and space exploration that began even before the Soviet Union crumbled are taking an ever-heavier toll, and the reductions would be stepped up under the budget that President Bush unveiled in January.
In all, an estimated 30,000 jobs in aerospace and related fields are expected to be lost in Southern California this year. The new cutbacks follow previous layoffs that have reduced the region’s aerospace and related high-tech employment by 83,300 over the last four years to about 340,000.
Many of those losing jobs are engineers and scientists being forced out of an industry that is their first love--people such as physicists Rod Britten and Greg Bearman.
Friends from their days working together at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Britten and Bearman share a passion for their science and a strong desire to stay at the forefront of aerospace research. But when Bearman thinks about Britten these days, he sees himself.
And he’s scared.
Britten is out of a job and, despite 10 months of searching, has no serious prospects. Bearman still works at JPL, but his full-time position is gone; nervously, he is clinging onto part-time jobs at the lab near Pasadena.
“It’s phenomenally depressing,” Bearman said of Britten’s job search. “He’s done everything you’re supposed to do when you look for a new position, and it’s been to no avail.
“It’s really convinced me that, in the short term, I’ve got to stay at the lab,” added Bearman, 44, a native North Dakotan who joined JPL in 1979.
That might be easier said than done. Bearman’s future at JPL has been shaky since November, 1990, when an $18-million analytical instrument he was working on for CRAF, a comet-exploration space probe, was canceled in a cost-cutting move.
With the new Bush budget proposal calling for scrapping CRAF altogether, Bearman’s situation is more tenuous than ever. Yet the prospect of having to leave JPL--and, possibly, scientific research altogether--is exasperating for Bearman.
“The thing that interests me the most is what I do right now,” he said. “I always wanted to be a scientist. I don’t want to give it up unless I’m absolutely 100% forced to do it.”
But his period of denying what appears to be inevitable is over. Bearman, who earned more than $60,000 a year while working full-time at the lab, has begun investigating opportunities in health care technology and environmental science.
Britten, for reasons much like Bearman’s, also fervently wanted to hold onto his job on the technical staff at JPL.
Even after being let go last April--half a year after being warned that his job was being cut--Britten spent several weeks interviewing at department after department at JPL, hoping to find another opening. It never worked out, apparently because his expertise in the analytical instruments known as spectrometers was not in demand.
Slowly and painfully, Britten, 50, came to accept that he would need to look for work outside JPL--and even outside aerospace. He is now looking into a teaching position in Europe and jobs at scientific instruments firms.
Meanwhile, he is plagued by bouts of sleeplessness, and his self-esteem is suffering. “Going for weeks and months, feeling that you’re not needed and wanted, it’s hard to take,” Britten said.
Not everyone losing an aerospace job is doomed to longtime unemployment. Some executives have management experience that can be applied in other fields.
Take Dan Raymer, an aircraft design consultant in Sylmar. Only 37, his resume includes high-level jobs at three major aerospace companies, along with master’s degrees in business and astronautics and aeronautics.
The son of a retired Navy test pilot, Raymer said he has been enthralled by airplanes since he was 10. Still, if he ever has to leave the aerospace industry, he is confident that he will still do well financially.
“I’ve got good management skills, good marketing skills . . . and good engineering skills,” Raymer said. “Unlike a lot of people in the business, I’ve got an MBA too, so I can do other things. I could run a furniture factory, if I had to.”
For most aerospace workers, prospects are far bleaker. When the big hometown industry fades, there aren’t many places to turn, especially during a recession.
That’s the case with Sifferman, the Lockheed plumber. Because of his low seniority even after more than 13 years at Lockheed, he is slated to be bumped late this month from his job in Palmdale, near his home in Lancaster.
At that point, there should be a job for him in Burbank. But with Lockheed due to cut three more plumbers before September, Sifferman expects to hit the street within six months.
He figures that he did what he could to prevent that day from coming. Sifferman chose to go into plumbing after finishing high school partly because plumbers and other maintenance workers tend to be spared when defense contractors slash their payrolls.
“Even if the production numbers are small, you still have to maintain your buildings,” he said.
But as the son of a retired Lockheed machinist and as a former president of his union local, Sifferman knows about layoffs.
In the 1960s, his father was furloughed several times. It wasn’t until the ‘70s, when he was well on his way to 40 years with the company, that his dad accumulated enough seniority to enjoy solid job security.
“It used to be that if Lockheed was down (in employment), someone else would be up. But it isn’t that way any more,” Sifferman said. “Everyone is down.”
Carrie Bynum, who works at the ITT Gilfillan radar equipment plant in Van Nuys, worries that her livelihood too is hanging by a thread.
Since September, she has been bumped twice into lower-level jobs as layoffs have rippled through her company. The next bump, she fears, will put her out the door.
Before joining ITT Gilfillan in 1979, Bynum was a shipping clerk “making minimum wage, dying on the vine. I couldn’t make ends meet. When I obtained this job, it was like heaven,” said Bynum, 40, who earned $26,000 last year.
For most of her time at ITT Gilfillan, Bynum has worked in the packaging department, preparing shipments according to military specifications. Five years ago, she was promoted to packaging inspector, a job she said brought her hard-earned recognition and respect around the plant.
“I had a very important job. Everybody knew me,” she said. As Bynum described it, she worked where “the product went out of the door, and I could say yea or nay” on whether a shipment was ready to go.
Trouble is, Bynum hasn’t gained many other marketable skills at the company. If her job gets eliminated, she said, “I’m basically back to ground zero.”
And, said Bynum, “I don’t know where I go from here.”
