Boeing Will Cut Up to 900 Jobs in Huntington Beach

In one of Orange County’s largest job cutbacks in recent memory, Boeing Co. said Monday that it will erase up to 900 jobs in Huntington Beach over the next two years, as the company shifts work on the Delta rocket and C-17 military aircraft to Colorado and Alabama.

Boeing said the cuts in Huntington Beach are part of a consolidation of manufacturing operations that began in 1998, shortly after the Seattle-based giant acquired rival McDonnell Douglas.

The cutbacks represent up to 11% of Boeing’s 7,940 workers in Huntington Beach, and will add to the latest hemorrhaging of aerospace jobs in the Southland. In the last 12 months, about 12,000 aircraft industry positions have been lost in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“The writing has been on the wall, but now it’s a reality,” said a glum Dave Martin, 42, who works in product control for Delta IV rockets. His wife, Carol, is an industrial engineer at the plant. “It’s pretty gloomy,” he added as he and many others filed out of the plant Monday afternoon. “I’m going to keep looking for jobs within the company, but it’s slim pickings right now.”

Boeing has about 14,000 workers in Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Anaheim, making it Orange County’s largest private employer. But it will soon lose that position to Disney, which is adding thousands in its expansion in Anaheim.

Even in a robust economy with a minuscule unemployment rate, economists say the cutbacks will hit hard because aerospace production jobs pay solid middle-class wages--on average at least $40,000 a year in Orange County.

The cuts in Huntington Beach will begin as early as July and are expected to be complete by the second quarter of 2002.

Boeing said it will transfer most of its production of Delta rockets, which are used for satellite launches, to Pueblo, Colo., and Decatur, Ala., where it built a rocket plant last year.

The company said Delta production has been cut in half since January 1999 because of a downturn in worldwide demand for launch services. Boeing’s Delta facilities were underused, said Gale Schluter, vice president and general manager of the business unit in Huntington Beach that makes the Delta rockets. “We just had too much capacity,” he said.

The Delta has been a workhorse for NASA, the Air Force and commercial customers, but failures in the new Delta III indicated Boeing’s possible vulnerability to competitive launchers made by other companies, including Lockheed Martin and Arianespace of Europe.

The Delta III’s first flight, on Aug. 26, 1998, exploded because of a software problem. The second, on May, 4, 1999, ended when an engine built by Pratt & Whitney exploded in space due to a fault in the combustion chamber.

Boeing’s Huntington Beach-based Space and Communication unit manages the Delta family of rockets, Global Positioning System satellites, the Airborne Laser and National Missile Defense programs. Boeing’s work on the space shuttle program in Huntington Beach will not be affected by the consolidation, the company said.

In subcontracting work on the C-17 military airlift craft, Boeing said it could not meet “cost commitments” that its Long Beach facility had made to the Air Force over the past couple of years. The transport planes are built in Long Beach and some of the parts are made in Huntington Beach.

About 600 of the jobs to be cut are in production. About half of those are associated with C-17 manufacturing, the other half in the Delta program. In addition, as many as 300 positions will be cut in related support work, quality control and supply management, Boeing said.

Cost of Living Called a Factor

Huntington Beach did not seem jarred by the job loss.

A spokesman for the city said it is difficult to keep manufacturing jobs in Southern California because the cost of living is high. It is easier for Huntington Beach to be competitive in the areas of design and engineering because those workers make more money and can afford the higher costs, such as housing, said spokesman Richard Barnard.

Even with the loss of jobs, the Huntington Beach plant will still have about 3,500 more jobs than it did when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, he said.

After the cutbacks, the Huntington Beach plant will continue to function as Boeing’s primary design and engineering center for space transportation programs.

Schluter said the shift of operations was not a sudden decision by the company, which had already acknowledged that Huntington Beach would not be one of the world-class “strategic manufacturing centers” that Boeing would invest heavily to create.

The Colorado and Alabama plants--which build only rocket parts--were targeted as areas where such energy would be concentrated, he said. Work has already been shifting to those areas.

Employees were notified about the pending job cuts Monday morning.

As workers left the plant’s east gate on Springdale Avenue on Monday afternoon, several of them, grim-faced, said the news had been somewhat expected but not such a large number of jobs to be eliminated.

Some workers recounted an anxious weekend after receiving an e-mail Friday about a mandatory meeting Monday morning. Another ominous sign, they said, was that the plant was closed for the weekend when it is usually open for overtime.

Rolando Vasquez, 44, hopes he will be able to find another job within the company. He said it is a foregone conclusion that his position as a senior project manager on the Delta IV program will be eliminated.

“I’ve been preparing myself for other work,” said the father of two. “But with all of these people coming out, a lot of us will be going for those few jobs that are left open.”

Richard Braeutigan, 52, a manufacturing engineer at the plant for four years, was all but resigned to the fact that he would be unemployed.

“This is it,” said Braeutigan, who was previously laid off from General Dynamics in San Diego and had been commuting 120 miles to his current job.

“I anticipate getting a notice and I don’t anticipate getting a job anywhere else,” he said as he raced to a shuttle and his long ride home.

Shares of Boeing closed Monday at $39.75 on the New York Stock Exchange, down 13 cents. The announcement was made after the markets closed.

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Staff writer Edmund Sanders contributed to this report.