Hope Tempers Fear in Facing Hughes Layoffs : Aerospace: There’s more retraining money, a stronger job market. Still, rebuilding career will be daunting task after Fullerton plant closure.

Just before Christmas, scores of workers from Hughes Aircraft’s complex here are expected to be sent out the door for good as part of the first wave of layoffs that will total 800 to 1,000 by the time the plant closes at the end of 1995.

Though the idea of pre-holiday joblessness is grim, those soon to be laid off can take heart. There is more federal training money available for dislocated workers than ever before. The Southern California job market is improving. And many former Hughes workers say that, despite struggling with despair and long periods of unemployment, they have emerged with new jobs, additional education and, in some cases, their own businesses.

“It’s kind of a blessing in disguise, I think. I’d always wanted to quit,” said Elmer Batac, who was laid off in May from his job as a machine operator after 13 years at Hughes in Fullerton. Now living with relatives in Tustin, Batac is training to be a medical technician. “I’m kind of hurting for money, but I figure that I’m doing the best that I can.”

More than 12,000 Hughes employees in Southern California, including hundreds from the Fullerton plant, have been laid off in the past few years. No surveys have been done to track how many of them have found new jobs or have left the state.

In interviews, however, about two dozen people who held various jobs at Hughes before they were laid off or retired described a wide range of successes and frustrations. Some, like Batac, said the changes have been healthy, forcing them to switch to new careers or to become entrepreneurs. Others, still unemployed, working outside their fields or in lower-paying jobs, said they see no immediate end to their struggles.

Like many former Hughes workers, Roy Robbins had a flashback when the company announced earlier this month that it will close the 37-year-old Fullerton plant and transfer most of the 6,800 workers there to other Hughes sites, mainly in El Segundo and Long Beach.

“I got a little bit of turn in my stomach, and it brought me back to a year and a half ago,” when Robbins was laid off from his $53,000-a-year engineering job. Robbins, who now owns and operates a book store in Costa Mesa, said, “I had to refocus and get retrained.”

Retraining has long been promoted by government and company officials as one way that laid-off aerospace workers might find new jobs, and Congress has appropriated increasing amounts of money for such programs. More than $6 million is available in Orange County this year, twice as much as a year earlier, plus there’s retraining money from the company.

Such funds have been used to pay workers to enroll in programs ranging from university degree programs to 10-week technical classes in storefront schools. But just as younger college graduates are finding that their degrees are no guarantee of employment, many Hughes employees are viewing completion of their own academic work as a leap of faith.

Mark Mazzola, formerly a Hughes test engineer, had been taking evening classes at Cal State Fullerton during his 11 years with the company. When he was laid off in August, 1993, his separation package included a $5,000 training reimbursement plan, and Mazzola used it to spend a year at Fullerton as a full-time student, earning a bachelor’s degree in May.

Mazzola is still looking for a job and says he needs more computer programming classes, which he cannot afford. The courses in programming and in computer-aided design that he would like to take would cost about $1,300 at several local computer training companies.

“I know what (employers) are looking for, it’s just that I can’t get myself to that level,” he said.

Mazzola spent July looking for work in his home state of Michigan and plans to continue searching there, he said. Meanwhile, he and his wife have been living off their retirement savings, his severance package and her salary as an insurance agent.

Some former Hughes employees have given up looking for work, and they remain bitter about being laid off.

Paul Govindan, 62, who was laid off in 1991, filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court alleging that Hughes discriminated against him because of his age. But the suit was dismissed earlier this month. Meanwhile, Govindan said he has sent out 25 to 30 resumes but has not received one interview. He and his wife are living off their savings, and Govindan is now thinking of starting his own business.

Govindan says his two sons, one in his 20s and the other in his 30s, have a different perspective on their relationship with the aerospace companies they work for: Northrop Corp. and McDonnell Douglas Corp. “Their generation has to face downsizing,” he said. “Emotionally, they’re more balanced than me. If they were to get laid off, I think they’d say ‘OK, goodby, so long.’ ”

The one formal study to track laid-off aerospace workers in Southern California was conducted by UCLA researchers last year, and the results were bleak. The survey found that half of the aerospace workers laid off in 1989 were jobless two years later or had left the state. A separate analysis of aerospace workers laid off in 1991 and 1992 found that just 16% found new jobs quickly, the UCLA report said.

Though the market has improved slightly in the past year, “the prospect of finding comparable work is still poor,” said Paul Ong, the UCLA professor who authored that report.

But Ong sees a difference in the more recent throng of laid-off aerospace workers. “There’s greater acceptance” of the realities of the job market in the defense industry, he said. “And that means there’s greater willingness now to find other work or try something new,” such as going through retraining or starting up a business.

Retraining wasn’t an option that everyone embraced.

Mike Yaklyvich, a driver and warehouse worker for Hughes for 13 years, is now employed by a Corona liquor delivery company.

Yaklyvich has a commercial driver’s license and was trained at Hughes to handle hazardous chemicals. He thought the combination would exempt him from the layoffs, so he was taken by surprise when he was handed a pink slip in 1992. “It was an awful feeling,” he recalled.

Yaklyvich’s job search, which he didn’t begin until he was laid off, lasted a year and a half. Jobs were easy to find, he said, but not at the rate of $18 an hour that he earned at Hughes. Perseverance paid off, however, and Yaklyvich eventually landed a job with Southern Wine and Spirits.

“I make more money now than I did at Hughes,” he said, “and I work a four-day week and get to wear shorts to work.”

Larry Hinds, 40, also bypassed training and sought work in a completely different field.

Hinds was a quality assurance supervisor at Hughes for 15 years until he was laid off last year. After taking two months to rest, Hinds began a job hunt that he thought would lead him to a small electronics company or another firm that would draw on his engineering background. But he now works as a consultant for Unisearch Inc., a recruiting firm in Orange. Hinds says he stumbled into his current job after contacting Unisearch to help him find employment. “It’s a good change,” he said.

Hinds said he may have stayed at Hughes too long. “Money is perhaps the No. 1 reason people stay at those aerospace jobs,” he said, “but I can’t say the job itself was a cushy one.” Hinds said one reason he was glad to leave was that he found himself taking on many of the responsibilities of those who had already been laid off. “Eventually you’re not doing what you were hired to do,” he said.

Some of the most satisfied of the former Hughes employees are those who took the riskiest route and started their own businesses.

Mark Grogan, 34, was laid off in March, 1992, from his $35,000-a-year job as a purchasing agent at Hughes’ now-defunct plant in Rancho Santa Margarita. Initially, Grogan wasn’t worried. He sent off resumes, worked occasionally on his weekend hobby--photographing weddings for a few hundred dollars here and there--and relied on $30,000 that he had saved in his company’s 401(k) plan over his 10 years at Hughes. “It seemed like a lot of money.”

But the tax bite in cashing out his savings was big--about $12,000--and Grogan, his wife and their three young children went through the rest in no time. And even with 10 years’ work experience, Grogan learned quickly about the market value of a high school graduate working in the purchasing department of most companies: about $20,000 a year.

“It was scary,” he said. “Many nights I woke up at 2 in the morning. My stomach was in knots, and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how am I going to feed my kids and keep my house?’ ”

After a year, Grogan quit sending out resumes and began putting more effort into his photography. He completed 10 weeks at a Rancho Santiago College-affiliated entrepreneurial training program for laid-off aerospace workers, called Business Ownership Service System, or BOSS.

He started to hustle for more business, advertising in the phone book and bridal magazines. In 1993, Grogan shot 13 weddings at between $500 and $1,500 each. This year, he expects to do 40 weddings plus other family portraits and commercial photography. “It’s sustaining us now,” he said.

Grogan works out of his garage in his three-bedroom house in San Juan Capistrano, putting in 15 hours some days. He says he wishes he had gone into business for himself earlier, but he admits he was afraid. “I was told all along that most people do it and fail.” Today, Grogan has no regrets. “I realize I’m living the life I want to live and doing the things I want to do. I’m completely in charge of what’s happening to me.”

Workers like Grogan are “living out their dreams,” said Susan Fox, director of the entrepreneurial training program, which is funded largely by federal money.

So far, 79 laid-off aerospace workers, including some from Hughes, have completed Fox’s 10-week program. Of those who established their own businesses, she said, 72% are still operating.

Not surprisingly, some laid-off workers have moved out of the region to find work. And more expect to do so.

Among them is Elliott Baltuch, who hasn’t worked since he was laid off in 1993. Baltuch thinks he will have to leave the area to support his two children who are still at home. Baltuch said he reads classified ads daily and also gets leads from friends and former colleagues. He has taken courses in business administration and met with a recruiter.

But he has come up dry. Most of the employers he approaches tell him he is overqualified or too specialized, he said, a common problem for aerospace workers.

Baltuch, a lawyer, worked in Hughes’ business management department. During his 14 years with the company, he pursued a business management degree, paid for by Hughes.

“It has been an interesting situation for us,” said Baltuch’s wife, Emily. She hasn’t worked since 1965 but is now looking for a job.

“Before this we were always in a position where we could give,” she said. “Now we need to receive.”

Times correspondent Hope Hamashige contributed to this report.

VOICES

“What is going on is that we are trying to find jobs in an imploding economy. If I had it to do all over again, I would have started looking for jobs out of state much earlier.”

--Elliott Baltuch, contract data manager. Laid off: September, 1993

“I would say go into a refocus or retraining program. It’s made a night-and-day difference in my business. And I really believe you need a contingency plan, whether it’s a hobby or something you can fall back on.”

--Roy Robbins, engineer. Laid off: April, 1993

“Keep a positive attitude, and come up with a life’s plan and go for it. I think it’s really an opportunity.”

--Ivan Sandler, senior scientist. Early retirement: December, 1989

“It was a big risk to go into business. In my heart, it took me a whole year before I really deep inside said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go for it.’ The thing I didn’t realize before was you’re better off taking this risk because there’s no guarantee of job security anymore.”

--Mark Grogan, purchasing agent. Laid off: March, 1992

“Write your life at Hughes off and move on to something else. If I had it to do over again, I would have started to look elsewhere while I still had a job at Hughes.”

--Mike Yaklyvich, driver/warehouse worker. Laid off: May, 1992

“People should think about switching fields instead of trying to do the same things over and over. A lot of aerospace workers can do other things, like selling health care or spas or something.”

--Larry Hinds, quality assurance supervisor. Laid off: December, 1993

“I was taking part-time classes the whole time I was at Hughes. There are jobs, but you have to think about the focus of your retraining or education and whether you’ll know things in the areas where the jobs are.”

--Mark Mazzola, test engineer. Laid off: August, 1993

Job Retraining Boost

The federally funded Title III Job Retraining Partnership Act provides training for dislocated workers. The program’s spending in California has increased 369% since 1990-91. In 1992-93, the year for which the most recent data is available, enrollment was up 55% from 1990-91. California funding and participation (dollar amounts in millions):

FUNDING

Year Amount 1990-91 $33.5 1991-92 $41.0 1992-93 $54.0 1993-94 $60.0 1994-95 $157.0

ENROLLMENT

Year Participants 1990-91 15,171 1991-92 18,698 1992-93 23,544

Source: Economic Development Department; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times