Ex-Aerospace Workers Searching for a Lifeline
Losing a job in the aerospace industry these days is a little like being stranded in space, said unemployed Covina engineer Dean Engelhardt.
“It’s like stepping through a door, onto the surface of the moon,” he said. “That’s how much opportunity there is out there.”
Engelhardt--jocularly flashing a badge that says, “Unemployed Aerospace Engineer--Will Work For Food”--is one of a dozen out-of-work aerospace workers who gathered recently at the West Covina office of the state Employment Development Department to talk about their dim job prospects.
These are middle-aged, college-educated people for the most part, some with the stunned look of witnesses to a recent disaster, others with the ironic smiles and self-deprecating quips that seem to accompany long-term joblessness.
It comes as no surprise to them that the Los Angeles County Aerospace Task Force, in a report last week on the devastating effects of the aerospace bust, singled out the San Gabriel Valley and Glendale areas as being among the hardest hit.
“You could see it coming,” says Engelhardt, 52, who was laid off last April by General Dynamics, the big missile manufacturing company in Pomona.
But for city officials and business leaders, often absorbed by the short-term problems of keeping city budgets balanced, the picture of devastation painted by the task force report came as a troubling revelation.
“I’m still trying to figure out why we’re one of the areas of impact,” said West Covina City Manager Jim Starbird, whose city’s only major aerospace employer is Hughes Simulation Systems.
One reason for the surprise is that aerospace is only a small factor in the service-oriented and retail-oriented region. An employment survey by the San Gabriel Valley Commerce and Cities Consortium shows the more than 60% of the area’s employers, and almost 50% of its jobs, were in either services or retailing.
Business people from the area have known for several years now that aerospace companies were starting to shrink. “It’s not like it happened yesterday,” said Aulden Schlatter, executive director of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce. But the broadening effects of the aerospace problem have left many in the area groping for solutions.
From the Lockheed plant in Burbank, which is relocating to Georgia, to General Dynamics in Pomona, which has laid off half of its workers since 1988, the downsizing of the powerful Southern California defense Establishment in the aftermath of end of the Cold War has left a swath of unemployment and shrunken profits, the report said.
Glendale and the San Gabriel Valley are sprinkled with aerospace companies, not just big contractors like General Dynamics, but small supporting businesses, electronic subcontractors or companies that forge, cast, heat-treat and plate metal.
For most of them, the trend is downward, said the task force report, which predicted the loss of as many as 420,000 jobs in the county by 1995 and a reduction of $84.6 billion in personal income by the end of the century.
Almost a quarter of all the aerospace unemployed last year lived in either Glendale, West Covina, Pomona, El Monte or Pasadena, the report said.
A week after the release of the report, officials from the area are beginning to look for ways of influencing the aerospace sector. For example, members of the San Gabriel Valley consortium, which recently held a conference on keeping businesses in the area, are considering focusing special efforts to retain local aerospace companies.
Glendale City Councilman Carl Raggio, a retired Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher, wants cities to band together to get state and federal money to retool the aerospace companies as producers of mass transit vehicles.
At city halls, the immediately noticeable effects of creeping aerospace unemployment are in sales tax revenue. “Our car dealers and our retailing sector are both down,” Raggio said. “It tells us that people have no money to spend. There’s clearly an indirect tie with the aerospace industry, which is one of the major sources of employment.”
Then, the effects widen. “People don’t buy, they don’t go out, they don’t invest in property,” said Pomona City Manager Julio Fuentes. “That hurts.” Ultimately, houses fall into foreclosure and utility bills don’t get paid.
The typical defense worker, said the report, is a 38-year-old male homeowner, who is a college-educated family man and a long-term resident of his community. “I suspect that’s a pretty fair description of the typical West Covina resident,” Starbird said.
For the record, McDonnell Douglas in Monrovia, Aerojet ElectroSystems Co. in Azusa and Hughes in West Covina, among others, report they are holding their own in the shrinking market and have no plans to move out of the state.
The big losers in the area continue to be two companies that were, until recently, among the county’s largest employers.
General Dynamics, which employed almost 11,000 in its affiliated Pomona and Rancho Cucamonga plants in the late 1980s, is now down to 5,200. The company expects the number to shrink to 4,500 by the end of this year, said spokesman Eric Solander. The Rancho Cucamonga buildings are up for sale.
“The bottom line is we’re looking to remain competitive,” Solander said. “We know there’s going to be less business, but we want to stay in defense work.”
Lockheed, which departed from Burbank last year, along with 9,500 jobs, has sent ripples that are still being felt in Glendale and the San Gabriel Valley, city officials say. Northrop Corp., with 9,000 workers in its Pico Rivera plant, may be facing cutbacks of its own, as the B-2 bomber program appears to be in jeopardy.
It’s not just jobs but businesses that are being hurt by the trend. For example, Seastrom Manufacturing Co. in Glendale, which makes hardware and metal fasteners, has lost 40% of its defense business in the past two years, said owner Wes Seastrom.
“We’re hoping like everybody else that it’s hit bottom and on the way back up,” said Seastrom, who has laid off 10 of 80 workers in the past year.
All-New Stamping in El Monte has seen its defense work eroding for two years, said manager Nick Kopinga. “You learn not to put all your eggs in one basket,” said Kopinga, whose company used to do “big volume” jobs for Hughes and Aerojet but now focuses more on computer and auto parts manufacturers.
Restaurants on the west side of Pomona, where General Dynamics workers go for lunch, are feeling the effects. The Berliner Kindl on Mission Boulevard, whose fare of bratwurst and regensburger has attracted General Dynamics employees for 10 years, is beginning to see more empty tables at lunch, said assistant manager Carolein Lee. The same is true at the Kasino, a hamburger establishment down the street.
Some San Gabriel Valley companies are finding opportunities in the decline of defense spending. For example, the Parsons Corp., a Pasadena-based engineering company, has gone from straight aerospace work, such as designing a missile-testing stand, to jobs that are helping the military scale back.
The company is involved in dismantling military bases, as well as contributing to the Army’s $1.5-billion chemical disposal program. “We’re designing a facility--a sort of de-manufacturing plant--that will be used to decontaminate all the nerve agents in Army stockpiles,” said Charles Terhune, manager of engineering.
For the group of out-of-work professionals in West Covina, all of them members of a state-run program called Networking Experience Unlimited, the task force’s call for a fivefold increase in federal job training funds seems a distant prospect.
Some are on the verge of seeing their homes foreclosed; all have experienced drastic changes in their styles of living. “We were all part of the affluent community,” said Frank Sulak, 55, a Covina engineer who has been out of work since last June. “Now we can’t afford to go to a restaurant.”
Most say they are willing to retrain, but they often feel there are built-in prejudices against aerospace technicians. Terhune concedes that there is a perception in the field of commercial engineering that defense engineers and technicians are “very specialized--a specialization that doesn’t match the needs of the commercial industry.”
On the other hand, he said, “there have been a lot of successes” in bringing aerospace workers into private industry.
