In the heyday of the New Economy, the Raytheon Co's defense plant in the southern California industrial town of Goleta was easy to ignore. Corporate mergers and cuts in military spending sliced the workforce in half. There was little to keep employees loyal when Internet executives from nearby Santa Barbara came calling.
"Some of our brethren have gone to the dotcoms," said John Bowen, a senior manager at Raytheon's Infrared Operations, which makes the technology for, among other things, night-vision goggles.
Indeed, said John Fennel, a manager of human resources, they couldn't compete with the fun-and-games work environment promised by the dotcoms. "It became not a sexy place to work," he said, "because we didn't have slides and beer on Fridays."
But after Sept. 11, Raytheon workers in Goleta, 160km from Los Angeles, are feeling a sense of renewed self-respect. Even though the Raytheon plant -- which also makes decoys that lure enemy missiles away from US combat planes -- is Santa Barbara County's sixth-largest employer, many people ignored its nondescript building and barely knew the company's name. But now they are taking note.
Executives are almost surprised by their new-found relevance. While Internet stocks have nosedived and many Americans are worried about layoffs, Raytheon's Goleta offices hope to fill 150 positions in the next few years.
"It's an ability once more to show we are a stable, vital company,'' said Jack Saunders, acting general manager of Raytheon's Electronic Warfare Operations.
Something similar is being felt across southern California, particularly in towns like Long Beach, where the old aircraft plants once dominated the landscape but have faded in importance in recent years. Many military contractors here scrambled over the last decade to transform themselves into anything else. Most notable was Hughes Electronics, once a juggernaut in this industry, which sold its military business to Raytheon in 1997 for US$9.5 billion, paving the way for its transformation into a satellite and media company.
Prosperity predicted
But companies that stuck with the Pentagon are seeing virtues in their old businesses and a revived sense of being needed. Some analysts are even predicting that military contractors here will prosper.
"I would call these companies both the hidden and reluctant beneficiaries of what's going on," said Howard Rubel, an aerospace analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York. "It may not be in a lot of big stuff right away. It will be in parts and small stuff. But this elevates the prestige of the military back to where it should be."
Some of those who joined the exodus have even come back. Kris Brawn, a San Diego-based project manager for Northrop Grumman who works on software for the B-2 bomber, left his job two years ago for a finance-related dotcom, but he returned in January after just 13 months.
"Coming back to a defense company gives me the opportunity to proactively make a difference," said Brawn. And during times like these, he said, "at an Internet company you sit on the sidelines."
But it will never again be as it once was. During and after World War II, southern California suburbs blossomed overnight to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of workers building and designing missiles, planes and other weapons. But when the Cold War ended, many of those jobs withered away.
RSS