<Begin Segment 16>

HM: So there was a message here. That the other part of the problem was hey, they're gonna can the program, and here we had, I think a total of six thousand people assigned to the SST program. I mean, at that point it was a very large program. We had a lot of research going on, we had a lotta hardware being generated, and testing and so forth. And this was March 21 of 1971 and the bill was killed in Congress. And the following day they sent out all the pink slips for the SST program. And he first thing they said was they were gonna lay off half the people in the SST program. And they're gonna lay off half the engineering workforce. And the pink slips indicated that. They're getting rid of a lot of engineers. And my boss called me in and he said, "You're not going to be affected by this thing. We're gonna put you in a termination group." We have to get our money back from the federal government, because Boeing had a ten percent participation function in this entire program and at that time we had spent more than twenty percent of the program budget. And so consequently we had to gather up all the contractual requirement documents, put them all together, put them into some form that is recognizable, put them into some order, and then send 'em back to the Department of Transportation.

TI: So Boeing could be reimbursed for this --

HM: Yes. For their twelve and some odd person...

TI: And how long did that take, that process?

HM: Well, I see these guys that had worked for years on these... and all this documentation, and they were thrown into these refuse bins, and here we had all these forklift trucks coming and they were going and dumping it into this big disposal process. And I thought, "Oh man, all the work that we did, and they're not even going to keep any of it." Well, they were so ticked off because they got their pink slip notice, they got two week notice saying that they're gonna be laid off. I can't blame them for what they did. But our job was to get enough documentation together saying that we did accomplish these different milestones and therefore Boeing should be reimbursed for this stuff. And that was our job; they had twenty of us doing that. So, I was taking care of some of the design information areas. It took us, let's see, until July, I think it was about middle of July, I think it took us to get all that data put together. And well, what they were doing is that when they knocked off half of the engineering workforce -- two weeks prior to that by the way, the chief engineer of the Boeing company came to the SST area. We had two different meetings in the cafeteria. They have a huge cafeteria in the development center. He had to have it in two shifts. And he made a statement that said, "Everybody here are the cream of the crop in the technical area of Boeing, therefore we're going to retain you people." That was two weeks prior to this bill being cut off. [Laughs] Two weeks later of course, when the bill went down, they had half of the guys getting their two week termination notices. So the faith and credibility of the Boeing company went down the tube immediately. And everybody was so ticked off. And what they did with the remaining people was they would do this toteming process. They would put them into toteming retention groups one, two, three, four, five. At that time we had five different groups. And after the first group was let go, then they totemed everybody and they said everybody that's totem three or below, would get terminated in another two weeks.

TI: So toteming was a process to evaluate the performance?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Ranking of --

HM: Both performance and the capabilities of the individual for future programs and this sort of thing.

TI: And would each engineer know what level they were at in terms of the toteming process?

HM: Yeah. They were given arbitrary notice afterwards. Saying that they were totem two, or totem four or whatever it happens to be. If you were three, four or five you were out the door in the next two weeks.

TI: And what was your level?

HM: Well I was at totem two. But that, we were kind of put in a different pile because we were in the contract termination group, so it didn't make any difference at that point. So anyway, that's what they were doing, automatically, every two weeks they were going through another toteming process so they would get rid of another bunch of guys and re-totem the individuals again. So eventually, even if you were totem one to begin with --

TI: You could be a five --

HM: You could be a five after...

TI: Later on.

HM: ...after the third generation of these toteming exercises. Well this was according to the contract we had. But, they could go through as many toteming processes as they felt like. So this was a way of getting rid of the workforce.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.