Boeing Admits Bypassing Jobless Aerospace Workers

The Boeing Co. on Friday confirmed complaints that it is deliberately bypassing unemployed local aerospace workers and instead importing temporary workers from Seattle to fill about 450 B-2 bomber jobs at its Palmdale plant.

Boeing does not like hiring temporary workers who eventually must be laid off, a spokesman said.

“We have a policy of only hiring permanent employees. Our temporary jobs are just that--temporary,” said Tom Koehler, spokesman for the Seattle-based aerospace company. He said Boeing’s imported workers can do the temporary work and then return to Seattle, but new employees hired locally ultimately would be laid off.

The company’s response was the latest twist in the controversy over its policy of temporarily transfering workers from Seattle to Palmdale--at an added cost to the government of $10 million per year--even though the Los Angeles area has thousands of unemployed aerospace workers.

The Los Angeles City Council, Mayor Tom Bradley, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) have called on Boeing to hire jobless local aerospace workers.

The Boeing statement Friday is in direct opposition to previous comments by Boeing officials who said Boeing had been trying to find Los Angeles-area workers to fill the jobs, but had been unable to find enough with proper qualifications and security clearances.

Friday’s statement supports complaints by angry aerospace workers and politicians in the Los Angeles area who scoffed at Boeing’s earlier claim, accusing the company of not aggressively seeking workers in Los Angeles.

A union official at the Lockheed Corp.’s layoff-plagued aerospace plant in Burbank said many unemployed Southern California aerospace workers would be happy to get even temporary Boeing jobs.

“If a worker has been laid off and he sees the opportunity for a $16- to $17-an-hour job, he’ll take the aerospace job and worry about security later,” said Don Nakamoto of the International Assn. of Machinists, which represents Lockheed’s union employees.

Koehler said Boeing has hired at least 100 Los Angeles-area applicants for permanent B-2 jobs in Palmdale since the start of the year, increasing the local share of its work force there to about 415 out of 866 workers.

However, the company in recent months has not tried to hire many local workers for B-2 jobs in Palmdale, Koehler said. Boeing did some minor advertising for B-2 jobs in Palmdale, but that was halted by May, the spokesman said.

The advertising this year consisted of one ad for an Antelope Valley job fair that ran on a single day in March in the Antelope Valley Press, San Bernardino Sun and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and a different ad that ran one day in May in the Orange County Register.

Koehler said he could not explain why Boeing did not advertise the permanent Palmdale B-2 jobs either in the Los Angeles Times, the area’s largest newspaper, or in the Daily News, which serves the area where Lockheed’s Burbank plant is located, or in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, where McDonnell Douglas’s plant is located.

One veteran Lockheed worker, who said he applied for a Palmdale job at a job fair this spring and never heard back from Boeing, said he believes Boeing was not seriously looking. “I kind of think Boeing was here because it looked nice that they showed up,” he said.

Requesting anonymity because he ultimately kept his job at Lockheed, the worker said Boeing’s claim that qualified aerospace workers were hard to find in Southern California “rubbed about 20,000 people the wrong way.”