Agency Helps in Transition

If you work anywhere near the Verdugo Mountains, chances are Don Nakamoto will know you’re going to lose your job long before that pink slip slides across your desk.

As the Glendale-Burbank area’s point man for Rapid Response, a little-known federally funded program that seeks to avert layoffs and assist displaced workers when those efforts fail, Nakamoto often has his finger on the pulse of weak companies long before they flat line.

Last week Nakamoto was monitoring a “dot-com” that was gasping for an emergency round of funding to extend its life and spare the jobs of almost 100 people. Next month, he could be helping workers slashed from an entertainment giant fill out applications for unemployment insurance.

With the economic slowdown, the acceleration of layoff announcements nationwide and the threat of twin strikes next year by Hollywood actors and writers, Nakamoto expects the going to get tough and is preparing to get busy.

The nation’s Rapid Response teams are to employment disasters what the Federal Emergency Management Agency is to earthquakes and hurricanes. They swoop in when layoff victims are in crisis, offering assistance ranging from access to a statewide jobs bank to referrals for psychological counseling.

“In situations where there’s been some lead time and employees have had a chance to ponder what they might do next, people in those situations are fairly responsive,” Nakamoto said. “They are pretty enthusiastic in their reception to us because usually they don’t realize that there’s all this free assistance available to them.”

But if a layoff or shutdown comes suddenly, the job of Nakamoto and the one or two employment specialists who usually join him on a response is much tougher. “Some of them are in a state of shock for at least a while,” he said. “It’s difficult for them to comprehend a lot of the things we’re telling them about at that time.”

The rapid collapse of so many companies and spreading layoffs will put to the test a local and federal government employment network that is far more sophisticated than it was during the last economic downturn. That network is exemplified by its triage arm, the nationwide Rapid Response initiative.

The response teams were among the first of an array of efforts that have replaced federal Job Partnership Training Act programs, which were largely geared toward helping people who had little or no work experience.

Such programs were of little help to the thousands of steel, auto and aerospace workers whose jobs disappeared when those industries began to shrink in the 1980s. Career engineers and machinists knew how to hold jobs. What they didn’t know was how to manage a wholesale career transformation during one of the American economy’s greatest upheavals.

“They had no idea what the job market looked like and probably hadn’t looked for a job in over a decade,” Nakamoto said. “They were under the impression that they would be able to get back into the work force fairly easily at a comparable rate of pay, which was not the case at all.”

Nakamoto, also a labor analyst for the city of Glendale, helped develop job training programs and defense conversion strategies when he worked for the Burbank-based chapter of the machinists union from 1988 to 1996. During his tenure, the chapter’s membership plunged from 13,000 to 2,500.

“We lost almost all our members in a couple of years because of the shutdown of Lockheed and its subcontractors,” he said. “So creating transition strategies for our members was a really critical thing.”

Under the federal Workers Adjustment Training Notification Act, employers of 100 or more workers must give 60 days notice of an impending shutdown or the layoff of 50 or more people. That doesn’t always happen, but, when it does, the lead time gives state employment officials an opportunity to call a local Rapid Response team.

The federal government launched Rapid Response teams in 1988 in six test states after studying a similar and successful effort in Canada. Nakamoto’s Rapid Response team is one of hundreds across the country that each year attend to more than 3,400 large layoffs and shutdowns.

Each state decides how much federal money will go to Rapid Response. In California last year, the figure was more than $22 million.

As it evolved, Rapid Response and its partner, the One-Stop Employment Center, adopted from unions the idea of collecting and bringing to the workers a variety of government and private services.

Now, in many communities, Rapid Response teams can direct victims of layoffs and shutdowns to One-Stops, such as the Verdugo Jobs Center in Glendale, a large, one-story building set up to look more like a modern insurance office than a public social service agency. Job seekers are treated like clients in a professional atmosphere, where they can get help with everything from applying for federally funded retraining programs to discovering “the color of their parachute.”

The Verdugo center was born in the Burbank machinists’ union hall where it was set up to respond to the defense industry layoffs following the end of the Cold War. Lately it’s been responding to the needs of dot-com and health maintenance organization workers who have lost their jobs as those sectors shrink. The goal is to get each person a new job before their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance runs out, said David H. Hendon, who manages the center.

“We had word a dot-com was going to close its doors yesterday. We were on standby the entire day and remain on standby to go out and respond and see what we can do,” Hendon said. “The immediate first response is to try to see . . . if we can avoid it in the first place. In many cases we don’t have a workable alternative, so it’s ‘How can we ameliorate the effects?’ ”

That’s when the Rapid Response team moves in to counsel workers.

“We focus on their expertise and the job outlook so they don’t feel like there’s nothing out there for them,” Hendon said. “They may not be ready to access this information. But we want them to have it, so when they feel capable they can jump right in.”

Rapid Response is more effective the earlier employers avail themselves of its services, according to the Department of Labor, which oversees the program. In some cases, layoffs have been averted altogether through the use of federal employee retraining funds. In a few cases, workers have seamlessly moved from a troubled employer to a nearby competitor with employment officials acting as intermediaries.

Nakamoto is preparing for the next possible employment crisis, asking for extra financial assistance from the state employment department to assess the health of area entertainment industry contractors. These small and medium-size businesses were battered by the commercial actors’ strike last summer and could be on the critical list if television and movie production is halted for a strike this spring. In addition, there’s a risk of production cutbacks even without a strike. Producers and studios have been accelerating production to stockpile enough new material to last through any strike.

Nakamoto wants to be in a position to identify those weak companies and offer intervention before any of the region’s 38,000 unionized production workers lose their jobs.

“Those might be the people that need the most help and would be in the worst position as far as seeking other work,” he said. “They are not used to doing that. They don’t have a network of outside jobs that they can automatically go to.”