Suppliers to Boeing Still Working -- for Now

As striking Boeing commercial aircraft workers walked picket lines Friday, workers at subcontractor Vought Aircraft Industries’ plants in Hawthorne, Torrance and Brea were told to think business as usual.

In an e-mail read to the three plants’ nearly 700 employees, Dallas-based Vought said the company expected to continue a full schedule of work on its Boeing commercial contracts through at least Sept. 16.

“After that, it depends on what Boeing tells us,” spokeswoman Lynne Warne said.

If there is a prolonged strike by 18,400 machinists at Boeing aircraft plants in Oregon, Washington and Kansas, work for subcontractors such as Vought could begin drying up.

But the effect in Southern California, once an aviation industry hotbed, will be limited.

For one thing, although Boeing still has a plant in Long Beach, it is mainly involved in military work, and its several hundred commercial aviation employees are not represented by the union that voted to strike late Thursday. The last of its 717 jetliners will be completed next year, bringing an end to commercial work at the plant.

Just 15 years ago, the commercial and defense aerospace industries provided 130,000 jobs in Los Angeles County alone. Today many of the factories and small job shops that hired them have been shuttered.

Direct aerospace employment is down to 41,000 jobs, most of them in defense, said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. The number of aircraft industry businesses had shrunk from 222 in 1990 to 135 in 2002, he said.

“One by one, we’re all going away,” said Gene Newman, whose Burbank machine shop once employed 25 workers making metal framing components for Boeing 737s and 777s. Newman let everyone go five years ago, when Boeing began consolidating its supplier network to improve quality control, speed deliveries and cut costs.

“Now it’s just me here, and I don’t supply Boeing anymore,” said Newman, 62. “They gave the work to bigger companies and left little mom-and-pop shops like mine out in the ocean, without a life raft.”

If Boeing and its striking workers take more than a month to resolve their differences over pay and pension benefits, many companies would start to hurt, analysts said.

Still, because of long industry lead times, said Jon B. Kutler, president of Jeffries Quarterdeck, a Los Angeles investment banking firm specializing in the aerospace and defense industry, any fallout locally “will take time -- and even if there is an impact it certainly will be less than it would have been years ago.”

For Vought and other subcontractors, successful diversification efforts in the last decade will help reduce the strike’s effects.

Vought’s Los Angeles-area workers build the entire 154-foot fuselage for the 747 jumbo jet and components for other Boeing jets. About one-quarter of Vought’s $1.2 billion in annual revenue comes from commercial work for Boeing. The subcontractor also builds components for Lockheed Martin Corp., Airbus of Europe and Embraer of Brazil.