A Town Under a Cloud : Sunnyvale Fears Missile Factory May Be Closed

Several tall trophies stand behind the bar of an eatery here named Togo’s--testaments to the winning softball teams organized by workers at the Lockheed Martin Corp. missile factory just down the road.

Adjusting his apron and leaning against the bar during a recent busy lunch hour, Togo’s owner Jim Thorne mused aloud about whether the ballplayers--some of his best customers--will soon disappear because the factory may be closed.

“I try not to listen to all the rumors,” he said. “I don’t want them to go, but all I can do is come to work each day and open the door.”

In the aftermath of the $10-billion merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta in March, Lockheed Martin now has four plants making missiles and space equipment--far more than it needs in the post-Cold War era.

So speculation is rife that Lockheed Martin is about to shut down two of the sites--one of which could be the 600-acre Sunnyvale plant, which sits on the southwest edge of the San Francisco Bay and employs the lion’s share of the 10,500 Lockheed Martin workers in the Bay Area.

Even if the Sunnyvale plant is spared, workers fear Lockheed Martin will again slash the number of jobs here--in addition to the 13,000 jobs it’s already eliminated in the Bay Area in the past five years. Surrounding Santa Clara County has lost almost 58,000 defense jobs since 1989.

The Lockheed Martin plant has deep roots in this city of 120,000, and it remains a pillar of the local economy. The company has hundreds of suppliers and subcontractors in the region, and city officials praise it as an involved and generous corporate neighbor. The mayor’s husband just retired from the plant after having worked nearly three decades for the company.

Built in 1956, the plant was here long before there was a Silicon Valley--its only neighbors then were rows of tomatoes and corn. And until the 1990s, the plant was Sunnyvale’s biggest employer.

Yet just as the crops are long gone, so are any false hopes among the Lockheed Martin workers still at the plant. Having watched so many of their comrades depart, they know the company’s next effort to streamline could cost them their jobs. “We’re just waiting,” said one engineer.

Lockheed Martin has said it will announce its plans within the next two weeks, but it has refused to discuss the details. The other three plants are in Colorado, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Besides unnerving the workers, the uncertainty has created high anxiety among city officials, nearby vendors (such as Thorne) and real estate agents already grappling with bulging property inventories in Santa Clara County.

“We’re on tenterhooks,” said Geri Cross, manager of the city’s economic development arm. “We hear they [Lockheed Martin] are going to grow here, and then we hear that they’re out of here. We just don’t know.”

And Lockheed Martin isn’t the only reason Sunnyvale’s situation could get worse.

The plant’s next-door neighbor is Moffett Air Field, home of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, which employs 3,900. Proposals to slash NASA’s budget that are now circulating in the House would virtually shut down that facility as well.

Beyond the economic hardships, closure of the Lockheed Martin plant would also have a symbolic impact, erasing one of the remaining vestiges of Lockheed’s once sprawling presence in California.

The company moved its airplane manufacturing from Burbank to Georgia in the early 1990s, and it left its Calabasas headquarters this year after the merger and made Bethesda, Md., its new home.

Closure of Sunnyvale would leave Lockheed Martin’s top-secret “Skunk Works” design center in Palmdale and its aircraft-services group in Ontario as its last major facilities in the state.

In Sunnyvale, Lockheed Martin builds the Trident II submarine-launched missile and the Pentagon’s Milstar communications satellites. The plant is also developing a new ground-launched missile called THAAD (Theater High-Altitude Area Defense), and components for the proposed space station. The Hubble Space Telescope was built there too.

The plant is a familiar sight to motorists, with its four-story-high white satellite receiving dishes sitting hard by U.S. 101.

“There’s a very strong sense of presence when you drive by it,” said Mike Curran, director of the North Valley Job Training Consortium, which coordinates worker-training needs in the region--and which will be on the front lines of helping laid-off Lockheed Martin workers if the plant scales back further.

At the moment, though, Lockheed Martin’s silence about the factory’s future has created an information vacuum inside the plant that the workers have filled with dozens of rumors about what’s coming next. These include not only a plant closure, but massive layoffs, transfers to other sites and big changes to the retirement plan.

“There’s apprehension every day you come to work,” said a 49-year-old engineer in the space group. As did all the other employees interviewed here last week, he declined to be identified by name, a sign of the tension that pervades the factory.

“There’s hardly a day that goes by where you don’t hear somebody talking about” more big cuts at the plant, he said.

Another employee, asked if the plant’s workers are prepared for bad news, replied: “Big time.” As he lunched on a turkey sandwich and sipped a beer at Togo’s, the 33-year-old electrical engineer said the workers’ consensus is that “thousands of people will be leaving somehow or another.”

That’s a bad omen not only for Togo’s, but also for other nearby vendors such as Bruce Barnard, general manager of Fresh Choice, another restaurant popular with the Lockheed Martin crowd.

As the company has slimmed down, Barnard said, he has been collecting customers’ business cards to see which other employees visit Fresh Choice. He hopes to target his advertising to those firms. That will help Fresh Choice persevere, he said, “but I’m not trying to pretend that it [a Lockheed Martin shutdown] won’t hurt.”

Although civic leaders are also bracing for the worst, they note that Sunnyvale is in the heart of Silicon Valley--home to scores of computer and electronics firms that would buffer the region’s economy against further cuts at Lockheed Martin. The valley’s vast technological resources are also one reason some think Lockheed Martin will keep the plant.

“If this was happening 15 years ago, I’d be in much more of a panic,” Sunnyvale Mayor Barbara Waldman said. “It would be a great loss” if the plant closes, but “it won’t be a fatal blow. Sunnyvale will survive.”

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LOCKHEED MARTIN’S SUNNYVALE PLANT

Lockheed Martin Corp.’s missiles and space plant, founded 40 years ago by Lockheed Corp., was once Sunnyvale’s biggest employer. But the plant has been shrinking steadily in response to the defense slowdown, and it faces more big cuts following the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta.

Bay Area Employment*

Lockheed Martin jobs, in thousands:

Current: 10.5

* Includes Sunnyvale plant and smaller sites in San Francisco Bay Area.

Major Programs

* Trident II submarine-launched missiles

* Milstar defense communications satellites

* Space station components

* THAAD antiballistic missile system

* Iridium civil communications satellites

Plant Chronology

1956: The 2-year-old missiles and space group (MS) moves into its new Sunnyvale plant.

1957: Polaris ballistic missile contract is awarded to MS group.

1962: MS Agena upper-stage rocket booster helps lift NASA’s Mariner probe into space.

1977: Contract to build NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope goes to MS.

1986: MS Bay Area employment peaks at 24,900.

1992: Army awards THAAD missile development to MS-led team.

1993: MS Bay Area employment falls below 14,000.

1995: Lockheed merges with Martin Marietta; the new company says it will announce plans to consolidate its missiles and space plants by June 30.

Source: Lockheed Martin Corp.