Raytheon Union Busting

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Raytheon Watch

Its Not the Crime in the Streets,
Its the Crime in the Corporate Suites

The True Face of Raytheon:

Union Busting in the Bahamas

WAR GAMES AND WORKER
WORRIES IN BAHAMAS

For most of its 33 years, the Navy's submarine warfare base on Andros, Bahamas, was a place where full-time U.S. civilians could trade the stresses of the mainland for laid-back lifestyles, year-round tans and a chance to sock away some money. As many as 1,200 people, employees of General Electric Co., lived there in the mid-1980s, when the Cold War was still on and defense budget spigots were wide open. In the course of a day, workers can go from observing air-and-sea exercises in big-screen war rooms to quaffing Kaliks, the local brew, at the Thousand Fathom Club. "It's just a rock out in the water, nothing like Nassau or Freeport," said Brian Luth, a mechanical technician at the AUTEC sub base since 1986. "It'll either drive you crazy or you'll love it."

Today, paradise appears to be lost on Andros.

A new contractor, Raytheon Co., took over the base in April 1997, cutting salaries and eliminating retirement contributions. That prompted many workers to leave, and some of the ones left behind say that forced them into picking up the slack with no promise of overtime.

Morale is so bad that Raytheon employees, a group thick with military veterans, voted in January to form a union and stage a walkout in the last two weeks of March.

Raytheon managers fired the union's president, Chris Kirkland, on March 6. But Kirkland plans to seek legal redress, and remaining employees say they intend to continue taking steps to make the union a formal entity under Bahamian law.

"They figure that by getting rid of me, they'll chop off the head of the snake and the rest of it will die," said Kirkland, who joined AUTEC two years ago as a diver.

Raytheon, based in Lexington, Mass., disagrees with the notion that there is widespread employee unrest on Andros. A spokeswoman, Toni Simonetti, said Kirkland was fired for proposing an illegal walkout. She said the company doesn't agree with the characterization of Kirkland as a union president.

"A union does not exist at this point in time," she said.

War games site

AUTEC, which stands for Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, is the Navy's prime playground to play submarine war games and test the latest electronic systems. By an oceanographic fluke, the mile-deep brine off Andros' eastern shore -- known as the Tongue of the Ocean -- is rimmed almost entirely by water too shallow for incidental shipping. The Navy pays $10 million a year to the Bahamas for the rights to that 110-mile-long cul-de-sac.

About 650 Raytheon employees -- both American and Bahamian -- fill the bulk of the jobs at AUTEC, which has only 72 Navy and U.S. Civil Service personnel. They supervise the mock warfare of subs against helicopters, subs against surface vessels or sub vs. sub. They monitor vessel maneuvers and the launch of warhead-less torpedoes. Finally, they evaluate performances.

Now, however, Raytheon workers say they are caught up in a war that's no game -- the war of cost control. Raytheon, the nation's third-largest defense contractor, took over AUTEC with an eight-year contract costing the Navy $149.4 million. The previous operator, AUTEC Range Services (ARS) -- a joint venture between Computer Sciences Corp. and Johnson Controls -- ran it from 1992 to 1997 for $180 million. On a per-year basis, Raytheon has half the budget ARS had, 40 percent what GE had.

In a Dec. 17 letter to employees, AUTEC Project Manager Dick Miller explained that, since 1990, the U.S. defense procurement budget has fallen 60 percent while the Navy's attack-class submarine fleet has shrunk by 40 percent. "Our bid price was predicated upon a compensation plan deemed fair and appropriate to meet the objectives of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC)," wrote Miller, who relayed an interview request to the company's public relations department.

Falling budget

A Navy spokesman echoed Miller's remarks. "The fleet is shrinking," said spokesman Gary Steigerwald at NUWC headquarters in Newport, R.I. ``Currently, there's no production of a lot of weapons systems, and a lot of what the Navy has is in excess." AUTEC employees felt their wallets lighten as soon as Raytheon took over. Their work weeks went to 40 from 48 hours. It announced a three-year phaseout of a foreign-service premium that supplemented their annual pay by 15 percent. Unlike ARS, it does not contribute to employees' 401(k) retirement plans.

Randy Guitreau, a weapons technician who has worked at AUTEC since 1969, said he netted $9,000 under ARS in the first three months of 1997, $17,000 the balance of the year under Raytheon. Moreover, he earns no premium for the 20 to 30 extra hours he works each week because the U.S. law that requires time-and-a-half rates for overtime doesn't apply in the Bahamas.

Guitreau, 48, is resigning Friday to take over a used-car lot in Vero Beach. "I just didn't want to sit around and watch AUTEC die a slow death," he said. "In my group, the average pay is less than $7.50 an hour. They cut our manpower in half and then we kept the same workload. We've got a lot of multimillion-dollar weapons coming in, and you've got to be on your toes. We're working our butts off."

Dave Coleman has been at AUTEC for 28 years, the last two as a test conductor. He orchestrates the mock battles between air and sea vessels, up to seven at a time. For this, the Navy veteran makes $12.75 an hour, not counting room and board.

Work takes skill

One employee who asked not to be named said the pay and benefits simply don't compensate the highly technical skills required for the sub center. "Granted, nobody's holding a gun to my head to stay, but they can't hire people off the street to do this job," he said. "It's not rocket science, but it takes a long time to understand the concept and become proficient at it." Simonetti said Raytheon has a "fair and equitable pay and compensation package" for its Andros workers, to be augmented by the April 1 raises. But employees found it suspicious that the raises were announced the same day that Kirkland, the union president, was fired. "They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts," said Brian Luth, who said he makes $6.31 an hour doing maintenance on smart torpedo-like targets. "They're doing it as damage control."

Although the Raytheon workers voted to unionize, it won't become a legal entity unless it is approved by the Bahamas Ministry of Labor. If it is, then will come the question of Raytheon recognizing the union as the employees' bargaining agent. Simonetti said it would, just as it does other labor unions. Shane Gibson, president of the 2,200-member Bahamas Communications and Public Offices Union, said the AUTEC situation is unusual because Bahamians normally fare better with U.S. companies than with Bahamian companies.

"From what I've heard, from speaking to employees there, the salaries are absolutely horrible," Gibson said. "People working there 10 or 15 years are making $120 a week, which is slave wages."

Kirkland, now living in Boca Raton, said Raytheon -- and the Navy -- may be taking unnecessary risks by underpaying people with access to highly sophisticated weapons systems. "Isn't this almost comical?" he said. "You've got people dealing with classified material and making next to nothing. It wouldn't take a whole lot of money to cause a national catastrophe."

THE MIAMI HERALD
Monday, March 16, 1998
Business Monday
Page 11BM
By JAMES McNAIR
Herald Business Writer

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