You’ve read the same stories I have: The economy is staggering and people are losing their jobs. Since the beginning of the year, we hear, The Walt Disney Co. has let 4,000 people go. Last week, Power-One Inc. in Camarillo announced it would lay off 1,000 before the end of the year. That comes on the heels of the announcement that it had already fired 2,400, at a company that started 2001 with 7,500 employees. As you move out of the Valley and into the more rarified high-tech air, it gets worse. Motorola Cellular gets rid of 30,000, Nortel Networks another 30,000. In the first two quarters of this year, U.S. companies announced more than 750,000 layoffs. About 40 percent of those are in the tech sector, 30 percent in telecommunications. Accompanying an economic downturn that seemed to come much more swiftly than those in recent memory (at least, to those of us with memories long enough to remember others) is the rather cavalier way in which many of these layoffs are announced. The most recent rounds are little more than footnotes to unpleasant second-quarter earnings reports. Lucent Technologies Inc., for instance, posted a $3.25-million loss for the quarter and, by the way, at the same time happened to mention that 15,000 to 20,000 more of its workers would have to go. Thanks to a spin-off of its semiconductor and optical components division, it gets rid of another 17,000. By the end of the year, if all goes according to Lucent’s plan, a company that started the year with 123,000 employees will have 57,000. It all sounds pretty bad, especially given the number of telecom companies we write about in each issue; and given the surprising (to me, at least) fact that the jobs lost in the telecom world now exceeds those lost to the dot-com fallout by about 80,000 and counting. So, let me ask you: How many of your friends and neighbors have lost their jobs in the last few months? Are the restaurants you eat lunch in and the movie theaters you go to less crowded than they were a year ago because people can no longer afford them? The answers for most of you are likely to be some and a little. Then, if you were around the San Fernando Valley 10 years ago, ask yourself what it was like then. How much trouble were you or your friends in? What was it like to make a payroll in the early 1990s? All of this feels a little bit odd to me. We hear about downturns, business slowdowns, dwindling stock prices, and yet life here seems to go on as if nothing had happened. Face it. By comparison, the Valley today doesn’t have it as bad as other areas, and certainly not as bad as it had it when the aerospace and defense industries collapsed a decade ago. In those days, industry shakeouts meant real jobs right here in the Valley were gone. Thousands of families who had depended for decades on regular paychecks from the giant defense plants they worked at were suddenly in serious trouble. It wasn’t just that restaurants had tables available. The restaurants and the grocery stores and banks and video stores closed down. Add a Northridge earthquake to the mix and the Valley had a lot of catching up to do. Things are different now. Go back to that Power-One example I mentioned earlier. It and many other Valley telecom companies are in trouble for the moment. But those 2,000 layoffs Power-One announced last week? They’re at plants in Mexico and the Dominican Republic that it runs from its headquarters in Camarillo. In a trial by fire all through the 1990s, for the most part the Valley purged itself albeit painfully of those 8-to-5 drive-like-hell-to-get-there-on-time jobs that are being slashed right and left. What’s left at Valley telecom companies, the ones in the trouble, are the engineering staffs, the research and development departments, preparing for the Next Thing. And, if we believe analysts and our own hearts, there is a Next Thing coming. Life, while awful for some of us in the Valley, is not as bad as it is for much of the rest of the country. Somebody, whether intentionally or not, did something right. The Valley’s economy is fairly diversified and many of us more or less had contingency plans. Those manufacturing jobs have been replaced by R & D; teams. The Skunk Works is gone from Burbank and in its place are hundreds of production and postproduction companies using digital technology to make TV shows and movies. Many business owners who’ve been around a while have decided not to stick their hand in the flame twice. For years, they’ve been watching costs, keeping payrolls down and constantly looking for new products and customers. This time most of them were prepared. Elsewhere in this issue you can read of a study conducted by the consulting firm Grant Thornton which tells us that 68 percent of local companies still say attracting and retaining talented employees is very important. Even among Internet companies, the figure is 47 percent. The study tells us that, while companies are cutting manufacturing jobs, those employees who are looking for and designing future products are just too valuable to dump and then find replacements for once business picks up. And that tells us, I think, that business will pick up. Michael Hart is editor of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].