Naval Shipyard Workers Hit the Road to Lobby for Livelihoods : Military: Renewed call for facility closure prompts more than 400 Long Beach employees to testify and make a show of strength at federal commission hearing in San Diego.

Monday was a day off for more than 400 workers at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, but it was not much of a holiday. They headed for a crowded auditorium to plead for their jobs, a task that is becoming painfully commonplace for them.

“It’s getting to be tiresome,” said Arturo Ramos, a 25-year veteran of the shipyard and a local AFL-CIO union official. “It’s very frustrating. It seems like nobody can really make any plans for the future.”

Ramos was one of an estimated 400 to 500 shipyard workers who trekked to San Diego on Monday in chartered buses and cars to argue that their livelihoods should not be sacrificed on the altar of military budget cuts.

It was only the latest effort to save the 48-year-old shipyard, whose future has become impossible to forecast for the 4,200 civilians who work there.

The yard has been subjected to cutbacks and closure threats for years. In January, the Defense Department proposed shutting it, but defense officials seemed to relent after intense lobbying and protests by yard proponents. Then, three weeks ago, an independent commission examining the proposed closures of military installations around the country once again singled out the Long Beach yard as expendable in an era of shrinking military forces. The same commission is weighing the Pentagon’s recommendation to also shutter the Long Beach Naval Station, home port to 38 ships and 16,000 sailors.

“We’re taking it very seriously. This is like life-threatening now,” stressed E. Dean McCown, a foreman who has worked at the shipyard for 24 years. She and other employees took a vacation day Monday to attend the San Diego hearing of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, an independent panel that must submit its recommendations to President Bush by July 1.

Only a few from Long Beach testified at the hearing, but the others went along for a show of strength. “We’re trying to let them know we’re not the ones to cut,” McCown said.

By now the union leaders and shipyard employees know the arguments by heart: The Long Beach yard has saved the government millions of dollars every year by completing work under cost and ahead of schedule. It is one of only two major dry-dock naval shipyards on the West Coast and virtually next door to San Diego, home port to a sizable number of Pacific Fleet ships that would have to steam to Hawaii or Puget Sound in Washington for major repairs if Long Beach is closed. The Long Beach yard also offers quick, easy access to the open ocean.

“(Closing the yard) is not going to save money at all and it’s going to weaken our defense,” contended Archie Barksdale, another AFL-CIO local official who sent five busloads of workers to San Diego.

He insisted that the Long Beach yard had been put back on the hit list as a result of complaints from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which also is targeted for closure. “We feel it’s political . . . and we intend to show it,” Barksdale said.

Shipyard workers are trying to organize the California congressional delegation on their behalf, and are calling on national union leadership to rally around their cause.

“They’ve been taking a hit at us for the last 10 years, but we’re not going to give up,” Barksdale said.