The ‘peace dividend’ engineering layoffs – and why they still matter

Readers of WND.com are familiar with the significance of the year 1990 as it relates to the H-1B visa, but did you know it was significant in the post-Cold War defense downsizing as well?

That’s right: Layoffs of U.S. scientists and engineers, begun in the late 1980s, began to steamroll in 1990, so much so that in 1992 a congressional report predicted that one in three defense engineering positions (or about 127,000 jobs) would be eliminated within five years.

It was called the “Peace Dividend.” And if there’s one thing those years and those layoffs taught American technologists, it was that this country has far more technical job-seekers than jobs available.

“Engineering shortage” propaganda was rubbish, falling by the wayside as companies from New York to L.A. laid off engineers and scientists by the tens of thousands.

What were laid-off technology professionals supposed to do? The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment that authored the 1992 report noted that because of their high skill level, “it is in the national interest to integrate these workers into the civilian sector as quickly and as fully as possible.”

While it may have been “in the national interest,” it was never national policy. To make matters worse, the incoming Clinton administration – when not offshoring tech manufacturing to China or redirecting auto production to Mexico – seemed hellbent on dismantling the defense industry at a more rapid rate than George H.W. Bush pursued. According to former Martin Marietta President Norm Augustine, at a high-level Pentagon meeting he dubbed “the Last Supper,” held in July 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and Assistant Secretary William Perry (SecDef in 1994) urged company leaders to quickly consolidate their industry. “We expect defense companies to go out of business,” Perry said later. “We will stand by and watch it happen.”

But who was standing for the interests of American technologists? Who was going to run the shuttle service from Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, to Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino (8.5 miles), or to Intel in Santa Clara (6 miles), allowing laid-off scientists and engineers access to opportunities in companies that never stopped braying about their need for high-tech professionals?

Who was working to figure out what the correspondence might be between solving software problems for missile defense and the type of software HP might need?

No one. Universities and colleges continued to funnel graduates to the over-saturated technical labor pool through a pipeline having no OFF switch, justifying their overproduction through dubious shortage claims while ignoring current market realities. At a higher level, government officials and key scientific advisers were busy trying to advance defense conversion opportunities for former Soviet missile experts even as our own rocket scientists searched for that magic bus ride to the commercial sector.

Who’s to say that you can’t retrain a Ph.D. scientist as a computer programmer? We made it happen in Russia!

It was almost as though a laid-off American technologist was expected to carry entrepreneurial genes by virtue of being born here and could somehow apply his skills even in a crowded market. The reality was far different, particularly for someone with specialized training or an advanced degree, who’d spent year after year solving the nation’s most complex technical problems, only to go from a highly paid optical physicist to an hourly-rate salesman at Joe’s Light Bulb Shop.

As the newspaper of record for the nation’s aerospace capital, the Los Angeles Times documented this catastrophe in detail. One 1993 article lamented:

From the executive shoved into an early retirement to the engineer forced to pawn his wife’s engagement ring, the defense industry’s decline has tugged at the very fabric of the family. It has made handymen of Ph.D.s, upset the balance in households that once hummed with routine and confounded children who do not understand why Mommy can never afford things anymore.

The efforts of America’s engineers and scientists went a long way toward winning the Cold War. We were the ones who’d answered the government’s call to study math and science when young. We were the ones on call 24/7 before a system was deployed overseas. And we were the ones most suddenly let go when the cuts came, with few clear options to maintain our livelihoods.

We deserve to be remembered for what we gave, and for the milieu in which we were nurtured – in the history, heritage, culture and traditions of a strong and capable people who’d made it through the Great Depression and World War II. We deserve to be remembered as stakeholders in that nation and not hired hands. And our technical progeny – American engineers, scientists and programmers – deserve to be first in line for any American job.