Jobs Disappear : Newcomers to Orange County, Mostly Asians and Latinos, Face Lean Prospects as the County’s Electronic Assembly
Ask Tho Phan what job he is seeking, and the 21-year-old newcomer from Vietnam provides a quick answer. “Electrical assembly,” he says, his boyish face beaming. “I want the job with electrical assembly.”
It may not seem like a dream job, but even before arriving in Westminster four months ago, Phan had heard reports of compatriots who found work in electronics assembly and turned them into careers, moving up to positions as inspectors, technicians and supervisors. He had heard that electronics plants hired unskilled workers who spoke little English and paid much better than low-wage jobs in hotels, restaurants and other service businesses.
“I can work in restaurant,” Phan says, between English classes at St. Anselm’s Cross-Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove, which is helping him find work. But Phan frowns at that thought, and he adds quickly, “I want electrical company.”
The stories Phan heard were true a few years ago, but today he faces a vastly different Orange County job market--one where electronics assembly openings are scarce. Once plentiful, much of that work has been wiped out by the recession, deep cuts in aerospace, factory automation and the relocation of manufacturing plants to places like Texas and Mexico. Even as the local economy shows signs of resurgence, electronics assembly jobs will probably never return, analysts say.
“Robots and machines are now doing what human beings did, so there’s a tendency for these assembly jobs not to come back even if the economy starts showing strong expansion,” says Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University.
The biggest impact from these lost jobs will be felt by new arrivals to Orange County, especially Asian and Latino refugees and immigrants, who found in them an easy entry into the U.S. work force.
Marianne Blank, executive director at St. Anselm’s community center, a nonprofit group that has helped thousands of mostly Southeast Asian refugees find employment, says Asians, in particular, preferred electronics assembly work because such jobs are culturally more acceptable than working in a restaurant or hotel. “It’s technical, and they could write home and be proud of it,” she said, “even if all they were doing was sitting and pushing buttons all day.”
But now, Blank says, they’re having to settle for dead-end jobs sewing shirts or packing medicine into cartons for minimum wage, because electronics factories just aren’t hiring as they used to. “It’s been very devastating,” she said.
While an exact tally of electronics assembly jobs lost in the county is not available, extrapolations from broader industry data suggest that the toll has been heavy, probably into the thousands. Between 1988 and May, 1994, Orange County lost 35% of its employment--or 13,200 jobs--in the electronic equipment industry, which, as a subcontractor to aerospace and defense firms, employs the most electronics assemblers. That percentage drop was nearly twice the rate of decline for manufacturing employment overall in Orange County, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.
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Aerospace companies have also directly eliminated hundreds of assembly workers in recent years, and more layoffs could be on the way. For example, Hughes Aircraft, which in the past year has laid off about 100 assemblers at its Fullerton plant, is considering closing the entire factory. A decision is expected in mid-August, and a closure would mean another 250 electronics assemblers would be out of work, union officials say.
Elmer Batac, 36, says he was among 40 Hughes workers in Fullerton who were laid off in May. The Tustin resident was hired as an electronics assembler at Hughes in 1981, two years after he came to California from the Philippines. “The job provided me with a good livelihood,” he says, noting that he had an hourly wage of more than $14. But now, Batac says he’s considering leaving the state and exploring a career in nursing. “Electronics assembly, it’s sad,” says Batac. “We need a war to get these jobs back.”
Manufacturers of computer hardware products also employ electronics assemblers and a few--like Orange County’s Kingston Technology and Viking Components, both makers of memory upgrade products--have been adding workers. But many others have cut back. Last year, Helix Circuits and Diceon Electronics, both manufacturers of printed circuit boards in Irvine, shut manufacturing plants that together eliminated more than 200 assembly jobs.
And AST Research Inc. in Irvine, the world’s fifth-largest personal-computer manufacturer, pruned its local work force late last year by 650--including about 450 assembly-line jobs--while adding 500 employees to its Texas plant.
“The likelihood of (future) hiring is pretty slim,” says a spokeswoman for ITT Cannon, a Santa Ana maker of electronic connectors, echoing comments made by other small and large electronics companies in the area.
Orange County’s loss of electronics assembly jobs is part of a nationwide trend in which such jobs have been declining since reaching a peak of 360,000 in the mid-1980s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1993 the nation’s employment in this occupation dropped to 315,000, with two-thirds of these jobs held by women.
Tuong Dobyns, a job developer for Catholic Charities in Santa Ana for 15 years, says there are 50% fewer electronics assembly openings today than three years ago. And she complains that the electronics plants hiring today are offering less pay than in the past, because employers have a bigger pool of jobless workers--including more with previous assembly experience. As such, electronics companies are being more selective, requiring better English skills and more work experience, Dobyns says. “This makes it tough for new immigrants.”
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Electronics assemblers typically learn on the job, and their work includes reading diagrams, soldering, fabricating and fastening components, such as capacitors. In Orange County, these jobs pay on average about $7 an hour, with most also providing medical insurance plus other employee benefits, private and state-sponsored surveys show.
Jim Thomas, vice president of Microsemi Corp., a maker of semiconductors in Santa Ana, remembers when times were different. Through the booming 1970s and up to the late ‘80s, he says, electronics assembly openings were so abundant in Orange County that “we were begging people to work.” But when the defense industry began retrenching a few years ago, Microsemi’s orders suffered, and in January, 1992, Thomas says, the company trimmed about 100 jobs locally.
Since then, he says, Microsemi’s employment in Santa Ana has held steady, about 425 of which 44% are Asian, mostly Vietnamese, and another 30% Latinos.
Such demographics are not unusual for electronics plants in Orange County. Bill Thomson, personnel manager at Interstate Electronics in Anaheim, says Asians and Latinos make up the majority of the assemblers at his plant. Interstate, a subcontractor to Rockwell and Hughes, currently employs 87 electronics assemblers--down from twice that number several years ago. Thomson says assemblers have ample opportunities for advancement and that their average pay at Interstate is $10 to $12 an hour.
Alicia Menendez, 39, got in easily as an assembler at Microsemi during the hiring boom, back in May, 1980, and has made the most of her opportunities.
Menendez had arrived in Santa Ana a year earlier from Uruapan, Mexico. She was 24 then, and “my whole fortune,” she says, was a suitcase of clothes and $450 that she had saved over the years as a secretary in Mexico.
Her first U.S. job was in a Westminster factory inspecting kitchen and bathroom tiles. Menendez says she stood all day, dropping heavy tiles from one hand to the other, listening to the sound for hints on how sturdy each tile was. “It was a hard job,” she recalls with a grimace.
When the tile plant closed, Menendez applied at Microsemi, a company she had heard about through a relative. That same week, she was hired on the assembly line at $3.90 an hour--80 cents above the federal minimum wage at the time.
“At that time my English was not that good, but it was still better than the Vietnamese supervisor there,” Menendez says. “My supervisor hired me, and said, ‘You speak Spanish well, so you can help me with other Spanish speakers.’ ”
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Over the years, Menendez has been promoted several times, to jobs as lead worker, inspector and supervisor. Currently she works as a quality-control supervisor and makes $13.90 an hour--a wage that has helped Menendez and her husband, a print-shop worker, buy a spacious four-bedroom house in Chino for themselves and their three children.
Menendez is now taking classes in business administration at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga. “The company is paying for everything,” she says proudly, “even the parking.”
Queenie Phu, another Microsemi worker who started as an assembler and worked her way up to an office job, says: “I did not know much English and I had no background in electronics. At first I didn’t know what I was doing.” Phu, who is Chinese, came to Microsemi in 1980, two years after arriving in the United States from Vietnam.
Phu says the job helped her adjust to her new life here because she had friends and co-workers at the plant who spoke Vietnamese and Chinese, and she could feel comfortable bringing ethnic food to the company lunchroom. “I was lucky,” she says. “Long time ago, there was such a big demand for electrical workers. They gave me an interview and I went to work right away.”
Today, Thomas says Microsemi has just one opening at the plant for an assembly-type job. And the competition is intense. “We get a hundred applications a day for that single job,” says Thomas, who is still screening the applications.
Alan Woo, executive director of the Community Resources Opportunity Project, a nonprofit organization that helps Latino and Asian immigrants in Orange County find work, blames electronics firms for the loss of assembly jobs. “We have a strong immigrant population here, but they still take the jobs to foreign markets,” he complains.
But Woo also sees some good in what has happened to the electronics industry. “It’s forcing our community to be more entrepreneurial,” Woo says, adding that his organization is putting together a proposal to build an electronics factory that would employ up to 400 assembly workers. Woo declined to be more specific, but he says of his and other job-placement organizations, “We need to be more creative with unskilled labor.”
The steady loss of electronics jobs has brought some changes. In vocational schools, Asian and Latino students who once might have gone through three months of training in electronics assembly are now preparing for careers in computer science and library science, program directors say.
Ewing Taylor, a 15-year electronics instructor at Rancho Santiago College, remembers his typical class in the 1980s. “At that time, 85% were Asians, and they went straight to assembly. There were jobs then, and it meant immediate employment at above-minimum wage.” These days Taylor sees fewer Asian students, and he says “most of them are looking to go on to four-year colleges.”
But there are still hundreds of new arrivals who cling to old dreams of what the job market once was. And most have found nothing but bitter disappointment. Among them is 28-year-old Dung Trinh of Westminster.
Trinh, a relative newcomer from Vietnam, last year quit his part-time electronics assembly job in Corona because he could not get enough work. Ever since, Trinh has been looking hard for another assembly job, but has come up empty. “In Vietnam, I repair fans,” he says. “I look for four, five months for job. But companies (are not) hiring.”
Dobyns, of Catholic Charities, who is trying to help Trinh find work, says she has taken Trinh to various electronics assembly plants in the county to no avail. Dobyns believes his halting English has kept him from getting hired, even though most of those plants have Vietnamese-speaking supervisors. A few years ago, Dobyns says, Trinh would have gotten in the door easily. For newcomers seeking work, she says, “right now is not a good time.”
Shrinking Job Supply
Manufacturing jobs in Orange County have been disappearing steadily since the late 1980s, particularly in the electronic-equipment industry, where 35% of the jobs have been eliminated since 1988, in thousands:
Total manufacturing jobs 1994*: 205.5
Total electronic-equipment jobs 1994*: 24.5
*1994 figures are through May only
Source: Economic Development Department
