Northrop to Close Anaheim Plant, Lay Off About 100

Northrop Corp. said Friday that it will close a plant in Anaheim, lay off as many as 100 employees and transfer 40 others to a factory in Georgia.

The plant, the last Northrop operation in Orange County, has made fuselage beams for Boeing 747 jets for more than 25 years.

Maria T. Oharenko, spokeswoman at the aerospace company’s Century City headquarters, said the company will farm out processing and fabrication work to subcontractors. As a result, 90 to 100 Northrop employees will lose their jobs .

“The decision was made as part of a continuing move to improve cost-competitiveness,” Oharenko said. “The aircraft business is going through a difficult time,” she added.

The transfers will take place by the summer. About 40 assembly workers will be invited to join about 300 employees of the plant in Perry, Ga. Managers told employees two months ago that the company was considering its options for the plant, Oharenko said.

“Since the beginning of last year, we have gone from five ship sets a month down to three ship sets,” she said. “As we did our evaluation, the Georgia site turned out to be the best business decision.”

Overall, Northrop’s 747 program work force in Southern California has dropped from 3,000 to 1,900 in the past year.

Northrop closed a larger Orange County operation, the Electronic Systems Division in Anaheim, in 1990 when it decided to transfer some of the plant’s 1,600 workers to Hawthorne.