Lend-Lease

For 15 years, Electrician Milan Cerkovich faithfully turned up for work at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, Calif., and for 15 years, Lockheed faithfully gave him his paychecks. The checks are still coming--but Cerkovich is not. For the past two months, he has been driving 30 miles to work at the Hughes Tool Co. in Culver City. High treason? Not at all. Cerkovich and 41 other Lockheed employees are trying out a new program designed to help cure an occupational disease that is particularly prevalent in defense industries: mass hiring and firings of skilled workers as Government contracts ebb and flow.

Conceived by Lockheed Industrial Relations Director Harry Winston as a way "to help stabilize our work force," the plan is a sort of labor lend-lease; it permits the company to hang onto hard-to-replace skilled men during slack times by lending them to other manufacturers that are short of help. Winston's scheme got its first trial last July when Lockheed lent a supervisor and 18 tool designers--all temporarily in surplus--to Northrop Corp., which was gearing up for subcontracting work on the Lockheed C5-A military transport and the Boeing 747 jetliner. Last December, Weber Aircraft borrowed eight structural assemblers, and Hughes picked up 15 electricians for rush work on an order for helicopters.

Under the plan, the workers get their usual pay and fringe benefits from Lockheed, plus a guarantee of one hour of overtime a day and allowances for greater-than-usual travel time. The borrowing companies reimburse Lockheed and pay a small fee for overhead. Lockheed's Winston figures that areas like Los Angeles, with its heavy concentration of aerospace industries, are ideally suited to the plan. His system also suits the unions, which regard temporary contract workers as black-market labor. Thomas McNett, International Association of Machinists' boss at Lockheed, is so eager to see the program succeed that he has written the lent-out workers to urge that they "do the very best job they can while working for another company."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.