Blue Sky Dream (30 page)

The next day a graduate student at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research modems this to me:

T
he tone of my e-mail matched the voices I was hearing, over the years, whenever I spoke with aerospace people who had been laid off. The tone resided in the narrow place between guarded hope and disgusted resolve. Few openly displayed the vitriol of one Lockheed engineer, dumped three years short of pensioned retirement, who told me that, as his supervisor gave him the news, he was thinking to himself, “I’d like to kick you in the balls.” (And who continued to feel this toward Lockheed management: “I hope they all get boils under their armpits.”)

More often they sounded like forty-three-year-old Chuck Goslin when he matter-of-factly stated, “I was downsized.” Chuck Goslin, like his two brothers, his father, and his father’s father, worked for the Grumman Corporation on Long Island. Grumman was the only job his father ever had, a job that started in 1945 and ended in 1992, and so he had known the company in a different time, when “it used to be you knew everybody and there was a lot of teamwork and you were proud of Grumman.” When his father had worked on the F-14 fighter jet and the lunar landing module that Neil Armstrong stepped from so famously, “It was a hometown pride sort of thing. You had a sense the
region
did this. That’s a good feeling. But the last five years have been disheartening because it all had become so competitive. We were bidding on things we knew we were never going to get. Why bid? Just to keep us busy.”

A manufacturing engineer, Chuck Goslin worked with 25,000 others at the Bethpage complex at the height of the Reagan buildup. But his company lost a key space station project to Boeing in the mid-1980s, began shifting electronics and manufacturing work to plants in Florida and Louisiana, and finally submitted to a takeover by Northrop Corporation. By 1994, Grumman had laid off four fifths of its Long Island people. Chuck Goslin
was handed his pink slip one morning by a manager who told him, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is I can’t keep you. The good news is you’re the last person I’m laying off this year.”

He was given fifteen minutes to clear out. “They were worried about sabotage, which kinda made sense. And there was a cut-off. If you’d been there twenty years, you got two weeks’ notice and a nice severance package. Otherwise, fifteen minutes’ notice, pack up your stuff, sign these papers and nice knowin’ ya. That’s what happened to me. I walked out the door, went home, called the missus up at her work and said, ‘Well, I didn’t make it another week.’ It was a beautiful day, I remember. I drove by my dad’s house. ‘Hey, that’s it,’ I told him. ‘I’m lookin’ now. I’m in the search mode.’ ”

Chuck Goslin’s search led him to evangelists of conversion. For years the local conversion activists had been pushing to diversify the Long Island economy away from Pentagon dependence. They had been crying their warnings even as George J. Hochbrueckner was assuring me that “Grumman’s view is, ‘We’ll be building aircraft for many years to come’ ” because “at this point Grumman is geared for success.” But now there would never be another Grumman aircraft built on Long Island, and George J. Hochbrueckner was making defensive criticisms of Grumman management in the newspaper, and Chuck Goslin had found work at the local conversion office as a career adviser to others no longer employed by Grumman. “Most of them are bitter,” he said. “Angry because they haven’t been able to rationalize what’s happening. They get no help from Grumman whatsoever.”

What Chuck Goslin could not rationalize is why conversion was such an impossible dream for a company like Grumman. Why did the region’s largest supplier of high-skill jobs have to be gobbled up and emptied out? Why didn’t Grumman, for example, ever get a chance to build trains or buses? “Airplanes,” said Chuck Goslin. “Cut off the wings, cut off the tail, whuddaya got?”

Instead, near as Chuck Goslin could tell, here is what happened.
“Grumman liked to call itself The Family Corporation. But the decisions weren’t made in a family sort of way. It was done with numbers. The top forty or fifty people kept getting stock options as the company lost money and people lost jobs. Now, just today, Grumman Northrop announces its fourth quarter earnings are a record high. And two weeks before, they cut 3,500 workers. Boom!”

I
t is September of 1994 and my father, having handed me another beer from the refrigerator, is winning his fifth straight game of pool. “What can I do? You’re invincible on your own table,” I say as the eight ball banks in and my father gives one of those satisfied
shtocks
I remember from childhood. He is smiling. “I’ve got something you’ll be interested in,” he says, popping into the VCR a videotape with the familiar Lockheed star logo on its label. “The latest propaganda.”

This tape, my father says, was handed out earlier in the summer by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Every employee was instructed to watch it at home to learn why half the workforce had been laid off in the past four years, and what those who remain might expect in the future. For fifteen minutes the CEO and a handful of other senior managers flash interchangeably onto the screen, their heads and eyes barely moving as they speak of “prioritizing,” of “investing smartly” in “core competencies,” and of the “need to be prepared personally for change.” Woven through their declarations is an anonymous, friendly female voice who lays out the grim facts.

“The last three years or so have been among the most trying the LMSC employees have ever experienced.… Thousands of our colleagues have lost their jobs. There are still many employees here now who are not confident they’ll be here a year from now.…” She revisits history to provide context. “It’s 1991 and the Soviet economy has crumbled. The Cold War, perhaps more a war of economics rather than military might, has ended
with the United States the apparent winner. But we as a nation have paid quite a high price for that victory. The losses to the defense industry over the last several years are staggering. Total sales for the defense industry were down 14 billion dollars in 1993. That’s a 10 percent drop in one year alone, the biggest drop ever in the industry.… From 1989 through 1992 the aerospace industry eliminated 291,000 jobs, and then in 1993 another 131,000 jobs. This left the aerospace workforce total at 909,000, the first time in more than fifteen years the aerospace work-force had dipped below one million. What’s in store for 1994?”

What is in store, the viewer is told, is more of the same. And all of this, the various talking heads of management go on to say, has taken them quite by surprise. After the Cold War ended, the downturn in “defense procurement caught most of the defense contractors unaware,” says one. “I think in particular Lockheed was,” points out another. Indeed, as late as 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leading minds of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company issued a plan called “Vision 2000,” which projected a 50 percent
growth
in the sales of Lockheed missiles, satellites, and such by the end of the decade. “Hardly less than twelve months later,” another manager admits, “that really appeared optimistic.”

My father offers a laughing translation. “He means: We didn’t know what the hell we were talking about!
Still
don’t know what we’re talking about!”

Now the woman’s voice is saying that things really turned sour two years ago. About the time Bill Clinton was elected, more projects were pulled, including the “cancellation of more than half of our classified business.”

A manager’s talking head appears. “There’s been almost a vengeance against defense spending now.”

“Democrats!” my father interprets with snicker. “Damn them all.”

“Clearly,” says the female voice of Lockheed, “something had to be done and it had to be done fast.” What was done is that
a number of “task forces” made up of “the best and brightest employees” were told to find ways of saving the company $46 million a year, ways that included the trimming of benefits and, unavoidably, the further firing of fellow employees. This, says the female voice of Lockheed, was “excruciatingly difficult and, at times, agonizing.” Sadly she foresees more “trying” months ahead “as we continue to grapple with the volatile defense and commercial environment.”

What the talking heads of management are wanting to say to everyone watching this tape is that they do have a new plan for Lockheed. The company will maintain its present size by trying to sell satellites and other products to commercial buyers, cutting the current 99 percent dependence on government to 70 or 80 percent. The company might also consider a merger with some competitor, says a talking head of management. As he does, he probably knows that Lockheed will in two months merge with Martin-Marietta, which will create the world’s largest aerospace firm while causing the elimination of 19,000 jobs in twelve states and boosting the price of Lockheed stock. But he does not let on to these specifics. He says only that the way of things is that “the strong will survive and the weak will be consolidated into the strong.”

“And finally,” says the female voice of Lockheed, “we asked [the company’s leaders]: If you could make one statement to the people of LMSC, what would that be?”

“Good-bye,” says my father.

“This is such a rapidly changing world,” comes the answer from a talking head of management. “Ah, we’ve had huge technological gains in the past but, ah, they are going to continue into the future at an accelerated pace and, ah, individuals owe it to themselves, they’ve got to continue education, continue improving their skills that are transferable not only among the company but ah, ah, you know, throughout the work environment …”

“N
ot a hint,” says my father when the tape has ended, “not one syllable of how the company is going to help even the chosen and gifted employees enhance their skills. If you make yourself attractive to the company, we might keep you. And the way we’re going to maintain our present size is to be successful in a line of business we’ve never been successful in before, and run by the same team of senior managers who have confessed that they were completely taken by surprise that, with the end of the Cold War, the defense budget went
down!

“So this all makes a hell of a lot of sense to the poor befuddled employee. In the privacy of his own home, where he can’t challenge the speaker, he listens to this monologue that tells him he’s up a stump.”

My father’s cynicism is infectious and I am chortling along with him, two friends perceiving together one more absurdity of modern life. What a laughable dream now seems the notion of aerospace plants shifted to peaceful pursuits as Seymour Melman had once prophesied it, an orderly process insuring “productive” jobs for the maximum number of blue sky workers. Melman the industrial engineer had looked upon the aerospace industry as a flawed machine awaiting modification by perfectly rational criteria. He had failed to see in aerospace a national enterprise assembled and fueled by myth, a myth that would have to be replaced by an equally powerful myth before any true reformation could occur.

The myth was as Harry Truman’s Air Policy Commission had capsulized it just after the Second World War: that the next war forever looms and when it arrives we shall prevail in the skies. The myth was that “self-preservation comes ahead of the economy” and so aerospace must not be confused with more mundane endeavors such as the creation of electric cars or magnetic-levitating trains or other machines that might help America perform more efficiently.

The myth that dawned with the Cold War has proven itself more durable than the Cold War, so that rising U.S. defense spending is now officially said to be calibrated for the fighting of
two Desert Storms at once in separate corners of the globe, B-2 bombers are purchased by a Congress for a Pentagon that does not ask for them, and the same Congress calls for a 30 percent drop in spending for civilian research and development by the year 2002. This long after the end of the Cold War, we can see how it will be. Even as the “consolidated” aerospace giants are staffed by a dwindling number of blue sky workers with fewer years, less benefits, lowered expectations, the blue sky culture will remain unreformed, stoic in its belief that self-preservation comes ahead of the economy. Conversion is an act of imagination and springs from a pressing desire to lose the old habits, to invent a new self. Desire was lacking within the boardrooms of aerospace companies; imagination was not to be found in the nation’s leaders who might have framed new myths to sustain a frightened tribe.

The word “conversion” has long ago disappeared from pages of newspapers and magazines, and my father and I don’t much mention it anymore either. The price of Lockheed stock, like defense stocks in general, has remained strong throughout. The architects of defense mergers have emerged rich (talking heads on my father’s videotape will be among the Lockheed and Martin-Marietta executives to reward themselves with $92 million, $31 million of it to come directly from taxpayers). Nowadays, rather than “conversion,” the words used to describe the transformation of the aerospace industry are the words used to describe employee purgings in other industries: Mergers. Buyouts. Rightsizing. Re-engineering.