SANTA CLARITA / ANTELOPE VALLEY : Workers Need Jobs, Not Retraining, Report Says

Large-scale retraining won’t help workers laid off by Southern California’s struggling defense industry, according to a congressional task force report on defense conversion programs released Friday.

They need new jobs they can do, not training for other jobs, task force members said.

“I don’t care how much training you do, you can’t train for more job demand,” said Rod Hanks, a vice president of HR Textron and task force member. “What an engineer needs to be trained on is a new job to go do.”

Defense workers are already highly educated and may end up in lesser-skilled positions if retrained, the report warns.

The 6-month-old task force assembled by Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) supports specific training for displaced workers, but only for existing jobs for which there is a demand.

“By the time any large agency such as government tries to create new jobs, the market has already moved to another level,” said Mike Brown, a task force member and managing partner of Priority Management, a Santa Clarita firm.

The 39-page document was mostly critical of the effectiveness of defense conversion programs.

A major task force concern centers on the lack of information about the defense industry. Federal, state and local defense conversion programs are acting independently and have few usable statistics, according to the group.

Robert Ormsby, president of the Lockheed Aircraft Group and chairman of the task force, said no useful information is being compiled about the type and number of jobs lost, directly or indirectly, to defense industry downsizing.

“No program recognizes another,” he said, and task force members feel the programs are not “going to accomplish anything--except spend money.”

Task force members summarized the report in a two-hour presentation to McKeon, who spent part of Friday afternoon touring Aerospace Dynamics International Inc., a Santa Clarita manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft parts.

McKeon said he is not surprised by the group’s findings and that workers should be trained for specific projects and research and development activities.

“I would tend to be optimistic, but I’m pessimistic about where we’re going,” McKeon said of the industry.

Task force members are similarly skeptical.

“The health of the economy has been based on the defense industry for the past 50 years, since World War II. They’re intimately involved,” said the task force’s Fred Falconer, who works as a consultant after being displaced from his job as an aerospace engineer. “If one suffers, so does the other.”