Northrop Grumman announces another round of South Bay layoffs

Northrop Grumman could cut as many as 550 jobs at its Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach aerospace facilities after laying off several hundred employees earlier this year.

The Falls Church, Va.-based government contractor announced the second round of cuts this week to its space business without specifying what programs are targeted. In February, it told employees that it could eliminate about 1,000 jobs in the two South Bay cities, as well as Azusa.

The company did not cite the reason for the earlier cuts and ended up redeploying more than 600 of the targeted workers to other positions in the company, which has nearly 100,000 employees globally. It said it would attempt to do so again.

“We are providing all potentially impacted employees with advanced notice and have begun the process of working to match them with existing opportunities across the company,” Northrop Grumman said in a statement.

The company said it filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice about the potential reductions with the state’s Employment Development Department and notified local officials.

Northrop, based in Century City until 2011, operates a historic 110-acre Space Park in Redondo Beach dating back to the Cold War where it developed the intercontinental ballistic missile, and has other facilities in the region.

The company currently operates a microelectronics foundry at the park and has multiple civil and defense space programs throughout the South Bay, including spacecraft manufacturing, space instrument design and orbiting space platforms.

Northrop took a hit this year when the U.S. Space Force canceled a multibillion-dollar program to build a new military communications satellite because of rising costs and delays in its development, Bloomberg News reported.

The company also has suffered cost overruns in building the Habitation and Logistics Outpost to house astronauts returning to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program. Northrop received a $935-million fixed price contract to build the module in 2021 and took a $42-million charge in last year’s fourth quarter because of higher expenses, raising its 2023 program charges to $100 million.

Northrop’s other Los Angeles County operations include a large aircraft facility in Palmdale where it is building the new B-21 stealth bomber, the center fuselage for the F-35 fighter jet and drone aircraft.

It also has facilities in San Diego, Northridge, Woodland Hills, Ventura County and Sunnyvale that employed some 30,000 people as of early this year.

Northrop is not the only government contractor to file WARN act layoff notices this year in California.

Lockheed Martin filed notices for more than 200 employees in Palmdale and more than 130 in Sunnyvale, and RTX Corp., formerly Raytheon, filed a notice for more than 130 employees in El Segundo.

In February, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off 530 employees, or 8% of its workforce, because of federal budget cuts.