Workers’ Tales : Three Hughes Veterans Face Uncertain Future

Scott Sechman came from a small town in Virginia, a high-school dropout who danced at the original Woodstock. Gary Tougas grew up in San Bernardino with a yen to build electronic signs and eventually became an electronics engineer. And Georgian Browne-Abundis, a graduate of Anaheim High School, was a longtime homemaker and Girl Scout troop leader before she set out to find work.

From nearby and afar, they and thousands of others came to Hughes Aircraft’s complex here in the 1980s, their jobs created by the bountiful military budget of the Cold War era.

There were the engineers, some fresh from college or military service; the union production workers in search of the top-scale pay of $21 an hour; and a host of secretaries and other staff that supported the work of making ship-based radar, traffic control equipment and air defense systems. For a long time, this divide could be seen in the color of the company badges: green for the hourly, union staff and brown for the salaried employees.

But a week ago today, there were no distinctions when the company announced that the 37-year-old Fullerton campus would effectively be shut down by the end of 1995, marking the largest plant closure in Orange County history.

Under a circus-style tent, the plant’s 6,800 workers were told that 800 to 1,000 of them would be laid off and that the rest would be transferred to Hughes’ buildings in El Segundo, Long Beach, San Diego and Arizona.

“Last week we all sat around and actually talked, commiserating with each other,” said one union worker. “Now we’re all in the same boat.”

It is a vessel full of growing tension and anguish as workers wait for the first wave of layoff notices, expected in about five weeks. With varying skills and experience, some already have clues about what awaits them.

For the thousand or so workers represented by the Carpenters Union--which has been around since the days of Howard Hughes’ colossal wooden flying boat, the Spruce Goose--few of its members today with less than 16 years’ seniority can expect to survive the upcoming job cuts, according to union representatives.

For the engineers and others, the decision on individual transfers and layoffs will also be based largely on the projects they are working on. The unit that makes sonar display systems for ships, for example, is expected to be transferred mostly to Tucson. About 350 people currently work in that unit.

But for most others, there are no clear signs of what will happen to them.

“Sure, it’s going to affect us,” said Eileen Derr, a secretary who has two daughters who work at Hughes in Fullerton. “But at this point, I don’t think any of us know what our plans are.”

Here are the stories of three employees of the Fullerton plant, how they came to work for the defense giant and how they see their lives changing now that the college-like campus will be closed, except for two leased buildings that will employ just 700:

The Engineer

Gary Tougas, 38, is in a rush. It’s 5:40 p.m. and he must be home by six to relieve the baby-sitter. He can do it now: It takes him just 20 minutes from the Hughes plant to his three-bedroom home in Yorba Linda.

But life is about to change for the technical director of the so-called SURTASS-LFA program, which builds sonar equipment for the U.S. Navy. His division is expected to be transferred to El Segundo sometime in the next 16 months, and he with it.

Knowing that he will likely have a job is a comfort to Tougas. Even so, he and his family had moved to Yorba Linda from Ontario just two years ago so that he could have an improved quality of life outside of work. His two favorite pastimes: home improvement and spending time with his two young daughters.

“It’s great living here, because when I can get home it’s still light outside and I can dig up the yard and put in sprinklers and I can watch movies with the girls,” says Tougas, as he and his two daughters--Nicole, 3, and Caitlin, 8 months--sit watching the animated film, “An American Tail.” “Before, when we lived in Ontario, I would get home and Nicole would be asleep.”

The Tougases paid a handsome price for this family closeness. They traded in their $88,000 Ontario house that they bought in 1981 for a $330,000 ranch-style house in a neighborhood closer to Hughes, overextending himself in the process, he says.

Tougas, though, isn’t bitter about what is about to happen, nor does he regret the 15 years that he has worked as an engineer. “I became an engineer because of the technology,” he said, not because he is interested in the military. “I’ll talk about sonars all night.” In fact, Tougas says he and his wife named their youngest child Caitlin Rachel Tougas so she would have the initials CRT. “You know, it’s just like cathode ray tube,” he says.

Tougas has always been a bit of an electrical wizard. As a boy growing up in San Bernardino, he learned about electronics from his father, who ran a small business putting up electrical signs on local businesses. “Neon signs, painted signs, any kind really,” he said of what he built as a youth. “It was very exciting. We got to go up in 150-foot cranes.” Tougas says he also got into other “nerd stuff” like building circuits in his spare time.

That interest led to a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly Pomona, which he earned in 1979. From there, he went straight to work for General Dynamics in Pomona and after a few years switched to Honeywell. And in March, 1984, he switched again--to Hughes in Fullerton.

Tougas has spent the past 10 years with Hughes as one of three managers on a project that employs 120 engineers, and as such feels relatively secure in his job. But he worries for others who may be laid off or who will choose to leave the company because they don’t want to make the longer commute and the lifestyle change that comes with it. That is something Tougas will understand.

The Union Worker

Often in the past week, Scott Sechman’s mind has turned to a day in 1976 that now seems foreboding.

Then 22, Sechman was scratching out a living in Tucson as a guitarist. But one day, Sechman and his band were called to play ‘50s music to an audience of engineers in the employee cafeteria. The company: Hughes Missiles in Tucson.

That gig was worth $500 to Sechman’s band, but there weren’t many that paid nearly that much, so two years later Sechman fled Tucson with his wife and infant daughter for Huntington Beach. And in September, 1980, Sechman was hired in at Hughes in Fullerton, along with about 10 others who had completed a nine-month training program in electronics that was funded by the federal government.

Sechman, a technician who tests radar display systems, says he would love to return to Tucson and work for Hughes there. And in fact, Sechman’s division--surface ship systems--is the one slated to go to Tucson. But Sechman has little hope of tagging along.

Yesterday marked Sechman’s 14th year at Hughes in Fullerton, but that is at least two years shy of the seniority that he will probably need to withstand the upcoming layoffs. “I’d be surprised if I survive 1994,” says Sechman, a tall, lanky man with fine brown hair down to his shoulders and a goatee.

Sechman, now 40, says he never planned to work at Hughes for more than a few weeks. Sechman had marched against the Vietnam War, and he felt strange working for a military weapons powerhouse. What he really wanted to do was work for the Fender Musical Instrument Co., then in Fullerton. “That was my big dream, to work for a guitar manufacturer,” he says.

But Sechman changed his mind when he got his first paycheck from Hughes: “I looked at that blue piece of paper, and I thought, ‘Wow! I could get one of these every week.’ . . . I just got sucked into it.”

Sechman started at about $7 an hour, but that has since grown to $18.82 an hour--a wage that has helped him to buy part of a four-plex building in Anaheim where he lives with his wife and their two children.

“What am I going to do? What can I do? Do I have transferable skills? Is anybody interested in transferring my skills?” Sechman says he has asked himself over and over in the past few days. He has no answers.

What Sechman knows is that he has a job today and that he can play his guitar and sing two to three nights a week, for the love of music and for the extra income, picking up $75 to $125 a night at places like the Off Campus Pub across the street from Cal State Fullerton.

“They say to musicians, ‘Don’t give up your day job,’ ” Sechman says, flashing a smile. “But now, it seems, I can’t give up my band job.”

The Support Staff

It was all an accident, says Georgian Browne-Abundis.

She never planned to be an executive secretary at Hughes Aircraft’s communications division. She never planned to work in aerospace. In fact, she never planned on being part of the traditional work force at all.

For years after she got married to Ted Browne, the Anaheim High School graduate was committed to raising their three children: Scott, Ted and Allison. On top of that, she was a Girl Scout leader, Little League organizer, a volunteer for the Republican Party and a member of many women’s clubs.

It wasn’t until her children started to go off to college that she wanted to get back into the work force and earn a little money to send her son off to the University of Redlands in style. “I wanted him to go with linen sheets,” she said.

But with few skills in 1982, she sought temporary employment and ended up at Hughes in Fullerton as a temporary secretary. “When I got here I could not use a computer at all,” she said. Two years later, she became a permanent Hughes employee.

Now, not only is she an executive secretary, but she is also one of Hughes’ biggest corporate cheerleaders. Her permanent job at Hughes came along at a time when she needed it, she says, and the company gave her the training she lacked to survive in the competitive working world.

Browne-Abundis had worked in a few temporary office jobs in her years as a wife and mother. But it was mainly light secretarial work, such as answering phones. At Hughes she enrolled in several of the personal enrichment programs that are offered after hours.

“You could take classes in anything,” she said, from personal investing to learning to run a personal computer. “Without the skills I learned here, I would never have become an executive secretary,” she said.

But it was the people at Hughes that kept her there, she says.

“I really enjoyed working with adults for once,” Browne-Abundis said. “I had raised children and had worked with children as a substitute teacher and it was a nice change to be around adults.”

Browne-Abundis said she is all the more grateful to Hughes because just a few weeks after she accepted the permanent job, her husband of more than 25 years passed away.

“Without this job I would have been without income or medical benefits,” she said. “I would also never have been able to carry out the plans that my husband and I had made for our children.”

With more than a decade at the company, she hopes to retire a Hughes employee. But she said, “Nobody really knows what will happen to them.” The one thing she believes, however, is that everything will work out.

“It might also be an opportunity,” she said. “It is written in the Bible that God never closes a door without opening a window.”