Northrop Grumman to lay off 900 at Jeff yard

Slowing military contract work will force Northrop Grumman Corp. to slash 400 jobs from its shipyard in Bridge City and 500 jobs from its other plants in Louisiana and Mississippi by the end of the year, company managers said Monday.

Layoffs at the region’s largest manufacturer, formerly known as Avondale, will eliminate about 6% of the yard’s 6,900-person work force. Most of the layoffs will come from among the welders at Northrop’s biggest yard in this region, the Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard formerly known as Ingalls.

The layoffs are the latest wave in a downsizing program announced in January that was expected to eliminate 2,500 workers, or 13% of the combined shipyards’ 20,000 workers, over three years. The first wave of layoffs in late January eliminated about 50 jobs from the Bridge City yard and about 70 jobs from the Pascagoula yard. Those were draftsmen and designers, among others, whose work is done early in the manufacturing process. The new wave of pink slips will go to those whose work involves early stages of manufacturing.

Many of the contracts that kept the yards busy in the past decade have ended, and the three big military shipbuilding jobs that were expected to keep the factories humming for years to come have been curtailed or slowed. The yards build only military vessels although they tried to build commercial ships several years ago, but that was a financial failure.

The most immediate concerns lie with the Landing Platform Dock, or LPD, a new generation of amphibious assault vessels under construction at the Northrop yards. The Navy in recent months has reduced the massive, multibillion-dollar program to nine vessels instead of the 12 originally planned. Most of the LPDs were scheduled to be built in Bridge City, but the local yard encountered major problems constructing the first ship, San Antonio, which was moved to Pascagoula for completion. Navy inspectors in June ripped Northrop for delivering the ship with leaky welds, corrosion problems, ladders missing handrails, overstuffed electrical wire passageways and other safety problems.

San Antonio will cost taxpayers about $1.85 billion, nearly three times the $641 million the Navy originally planned to spend on the vessel.

Congress also has delayed the start of work at the Pascagoula yard on the DD(X) destroyer, and the Navy has cut the number of the ships that it plans to order from as many as 24 to as few as eight. Finally, Congress is considering delaying the start of work on eight Coast Guard national security cutters set to be built by the Northrop yards.

Without more work soon, the former Avondale yard could find itself relegated to a support role to Northrop’s larger and more technologically advanced yard in Pascagoula, industry observers have said.

Northrop managers have stopped using the former names for the shipyards as part of their effort to meld the factories into a seamless Gulf Coast manufacturing complex.