Now in his 21st year working for the giant Lucent Technologies factory here, Bruce Bennett has seen the flow of optical telecommunications gear coming through his testing lab go from a torrent that guaranteed plenty of overtime to a trickle. He's seen US$175,000 worth of wealth in his retirement account evaporate as Lucent stock has collapsed.
And now Bennett is growing increasingly resigned to the likelihood that his very job will soon be the next thing to vanish, as a once-soaring Lucent desperately slashes operations in hopes of turning from US$1 billion-a-month losses back to profitability. On the auction block: its landmark Osgood Street plant here near the Haverhill line, and as many as 1,800 of the 2,400 manufacturing jobs that Lucent hopes but cannot promise another company would pick up as a "contract manufacturer."
"It is very depressing to go to work," Bennett, 46, said on Wednesday at the office of Communications Workers Local 1365, where he serves as a shop steward for testing division employees. "The mood is horrible. There's not much work to do. There's not much being ordered. You can spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs."
Bennett says he can remember days in the 1980s when 10,000 people worked at the North Andover site "and you had to wait in line to go to the bathroom. Literally wait in line."
Like everyone else at the plant, which started a half century ago making telephone gear for the AT&T Bell System, Bennett is anxious over having no clear answers from Lucent about what will happen to their jobs, and when. Nor does he have great optimism that a contract manufacturer would want to buy the sprawling complex.
"In the back of my mind, I know I've got to go find a job," Bennett said. "It's just a matter of when."
In an announcement that landed like a bomb on the Merrimack Valley economy last Friday, Lucent revealed that as part of its continuing drive to shed its nuts-and-bolts manufacturing business, it hopes to sell the North Andover plant. Last month it reached agreements with Toronto-based Celestica to acquire its plants in Columbus, Ohio, and Oklahoma City.
About 4,000 people now work at the North Andover plant, 1,500 fewer than last summer and roughly 8,000 below the peak staffing levels of 1980s. Lucent -- along with Raytheon in Andover -- remains one of the mainstays of the Merrimack Valley economy.
Beyond North Andover, Lucent has become a major player in the state's high-tech economy through acquiring a dozen Bay State startups since 1996, including large operations in Boxborough, Cambridge, Hyannis, Marlborough and Westford.
`Lucentless future'
But now longtime employees and local activists are focusing on what the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Massachusetts, on Monday editorialized is the increasing likelihood of "a Lucent-less future" for North Andover and the region.
Lucent said it is pursuing a plan that could eliminate between 1,400 to 1,800 jobs. Between 600 to 800 workers employed in North Andover would remain with the company, selling, assembling and testing equipment. The fate of an addtional 1,600 to 1,800 manufacturing workers depends on whether Lucent can convince a contract manufacturer to hire the employees. The company is also considering an alternative plan to move remaining jobs to another Lucent site within a 35-mile radius and mothball the entire North Andover facility.
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