Job Cuts on Minds of Employees

When will the job cuts come, and how deep will they be?

Those were the main concerns on the minds of workers at Hughes Electronics Corp.’s defense operations Thursday after the early-afternoon announcement that Raytheon Corp. agreed to buy their organization for $9.5 billion.

The news of the deal itself, delivered to employees over closed-circuit TV, seemed almost anticlimactic after weeks of hot speculation about the anticipated sale.

“I guess it [was] inevitable that we would be sold off, the way the defense industry is going,” said Steven Simon, a 32-year-old engineer at Hughes’ electrical optical systems unit in El Segundo. “You’re either very big or bought out by somebody very big. We just figured it was a matter of time before GM would sell us.”

In all, about 40,000 Hughes workers nationally, including 15,000 in Southern California, will be included in the Raytheon transaction. An untold number of those workers will ultimately be laid off, once consolidation of the two companies begins.

Both in the minds of Hughes personnel and outside observers, Raytheon gets mixed grades as an employer. Some employees called Raytheon a respected competitor and expressed hope that it would thus be an effective bidder for new contracts.

A 1995 report by the nonprofit group Council on Economic Priorities described the Lexington, Mass.-based company as having “relatively calm” relations with its unions. In the early 1990s, though, the group gave Raytheon a “worse than average” rating for workplace safety.

Union officials representing Hughes and Raytheon employees declined to return phone calls.

Still, the biggest concern among the Hughes staffers was for their jobs.

Among the nervous workers are those stuck in the middle--that is, those who aren’t sure whether their operations will be snapped up by Raytheon or remain with Hughes’ current owner, General Motors.

An employee at the Hughes Communications Products facility in Torrance, for example, pointed out that about half of her operation is defense-related and half isn’t.

The employee, who asked not to be identified, takes some small comfort in the fact that no cuts are likely immediately but added that “losing your job is everyone’s worst fear.”

For Hughes veterans who have been around since GM acquired the company in 1985, the newly announced deal marked another, and sad, step away from the organization’s treasured past.

Before GM took over, the company was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and insulated from many of the cutthroat pressures of private industry. Engineers reveled in the opportunity to pursue research and development projects.

“We didn’t have stockholders to worry about, and we pushed back a ton of money into R&D;,” recalled Roger Bilyeu, who retired from Hughes in 1989 after 35 years as an electronics engineer and manager with the company. “We had a lot of freedom.”

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Times staff writer Emily Otani contributed to this story.