THE AEROSPACE CRISIS : THE WORKERS : Meager Industry Retraining Effort Hinders Jobless

After Robert Enich lost his job at Lockheed Corp. 14 months ago, he found out first-hand about the shortcomings in job retraining for Southern California’s legions of unemployed aerospace workers.

Enich, laid off after 18 years as an electrician at Lockheed, decided to get a fresh start by taking a 12-week program last fall in hazardous materials and pollution control technology. With his new training and his background in electronics, Enich, 46, figured that he would have a reasonably easy time landing a technical job, perhaps with a firm that designed or installed pollution-control equipment.

But today, Enich still is out of work, a victim of the wide gap between what Southern California’s unemployed aerospace workers need and what they appear to be getting. According to a sharply critical new study by the Los Angeles County Aerospace Task Force, far too few aerospace job hunters are being retrained adequately to reinvigorate the local economy.

While an estimated 38% of the county’s laid-off aerospace workers need new training, only about 1% to 2% of them are getting it, the study says. And even for the lucky few such as Enich who have gotten into programs, the picture is bleak.

According to the study, 66% of workers who need retraining would require six to 18 months of education to find jobs “at skill levels comparable to their old jobs, but virtually no training is being provided that lasts longer than three months.”

On top of that, many job hunters receive little or no useful job placement advice from any agency.

“From a big-picture point of view, the most important factor in our future economic growth is the skills of our work force,” said Daniel Flaming, one of the authors of the study and president of the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group based in Los Angeles.

The problem, he said, is that “we don’t see job training strategically in that light.” Flaming said the result is that aerospace workers, when they find new employment, are taking jobs that make poor use of their skills.

What limited training programs are available, Flaming said, tend to reach job hunters too late, when they already are desperate for work--another reason why they so often cut their training short.

Enich, for instance, says his 12 weeks of training haven’t been enough to entice employers looking for hazardous waste or pollution control specialists. There are some low-level openings in the field, but those are unskilled jobs paying far less than the $17 an hour he used to earn at Lockheed’s Burbank plant.

For the best jobs, Enrich said, employers mainly seem to want four-year college graduates. “There’s not much in the middle,” he said.

Still, he expressed frustration with employers who don’t seem to give him a chance. “Life experience in general should add up to something,” he said. “A lot of employers are put off by people who worked in aerospace because they think they can’t do the job or they’ll want too much money.”

Enrich, who holds a two-year college degree in electronics, would be willing to go back to school for more education. But these days, his savings are dwindling, he is close to running out of unemployment insurance benefits, and he is paying $394 a month for health insurance. So, he said, he needs to concentrate on getting a job.

In part, Flaming said, the problems in Los Angeles are similar to those across the country. The American tradition of individualism, he said, has contributed to a nationwide feeling of ambivalence about job training and other initiatives regarded as social welfare.

Still, he said, there have been notable actions taken in other communities. One example: When thousands of steel workers in the Pittsburgh, Pa., area lost their jobs in the 1980s, county officials provided special stipends to displaced workers who agreed to stay in college until they received two-year degrees.

While agreeing with the general conclusions of the task force’s report, many employment specialists also cited other problems that hurt aerospace workers’ chances of getting new jobs. Don Nakamoto, research director for the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at Lockheed’s Burbank plant, said the weak local economy simply is providing too few good jobs to replace the ones lost in aerospace.