Navy Will Cut 1,300 Jobs at Its Shipyard in Long Beach

There was more bad news for Los Angeles-area shipyard workers Thursday as the Navy announced that nearly 1,300 jobs will be cut at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard within the next few months.

The sprawling Terminal Island facility, where the battleship New Jersey was taken out of mothballs and the battleship Missouri is being readied for recommissioning, is one of eight government-owned shipyards that are losing a total of more than 5,500 jobs, or 7% of the work force, by the end of this year.

The Navy Department said it probably will eliminate another 1,300 jobs at the eight shipyards by Sept. 30, 1986.

Long Beach and Norfolk, Va., were the hardest hit by Thursday’s announcement. The others slated for cutbacks are at Portsmouth, N.H.; Philadelphia; Charleston, S.C.; Puget Sound, Wash.; Mare Island, in San Francisco Bay, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The news was jarring for the local employment picture, already damaged by the private Todd Shipyards Corp. decision to lay off 1,200 workers at its San Pedro yard after failing to win a multimillion-dollar Navy contract to build the first Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

Only 400 of the jobs to be eliminated at Long Beach will involve actual firings of full-time employees, said Gil Bond, the shipyard’s industrial relations director. Another 895, he said, will be eliminated through attrition, retirement, termination of temporary appointments and free-will departures for new jobs elsewhere.

Bond said 49 people already are in the process of being terminated in June, and the shipyard plans to issue notices by about July 20 to the 400 full-time employees being cut in the latest Navy reduction.

The total cutback of 1,295 should be realized by Dec. 31, he said.

In late 1983, the Navy announced that 814 Long Beach jobs were being cut, but the shipyard was able to reduce the number of layoffs to 325, partly because the Missouri was towed in earlier than scheduled for recommissioning work.

“But now,” Bond said, “we have no projection of anything coming in to take up the slack.”

With Todd Shipyards having its own problems, Bond added, “this area is certainly going to feel an impact.”

Frank Rodriguez, president of the Federal Employees Metal Trades Council, which represents 13 shipyard unions, said, “Obviously, we don’t like it . . . but there’s not a hell of a lot of repair work out there. Todd used to do the new construction, and we got a good share of the repair work. Now we’re both going to be fighting over the repair work.”

The Navy said in Washington, D.C., that the eight yards employed nearly 78,000 workers as of Feb. 28 and that the number will drop to 72,699 by the end of September, to 72,360 by Dec. 31 and to 71,058 by Sept. 30, 1986.

It became known in February that Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. was anxious to reduce overall employment in the Navy’s shipyards and to use private shipyards for overhauls as much as possible.

On Thursday, the Navy said the decision was prompted primarily by a reduction in the number of ships needing repair work. It said it expects the amount of work contracted out to private yards to remain fairly steady for the time being.

Mare Island will lose 328 jobs, with about 150 of those involving actual layoffs. Pearl Harbor will cut 628, including 550 layoffs.