Fundamentally the clown in the article should have known a few things:
The C-17 production line he worked lived and died at the hands of Congress.
The USAF was only going to be given enough money to by a certain number of them. Once they got close to their number, the gravy train is coming to an end, period
C-17 is a lower priority than the pointy nose F-35 (actually, EVERYTHING is lower priority than that piece of shit), ergo the USAF is going to sacrifice anything and everything on the altar of the F-35 (note: A-10 latest)
The overseas market is tiny compared to the USAF. India bought a few, NATO a few, Aus a few - combined they're a year, year and a half of production.
Given the above facts that take only a basic awareness of whats going on in the industry you're working in, one should be able to deduce that the end of the line is coming and plan accordingly. This should not have been a surprise to the person in the article, nor anyone else in Long Beach.
Note to aerospace workers in St. Louis: The F-15 and F-18 lines are shutting down within a few years - watch the order book, count how many were delivered in 2014, divide current backlog by current production rate and you can pretty much figure out when you're out the door. Note, you may get pushed out a year or two ahead of the bitter end as things ramp down. Get your shit together. There is no changing this fact. If you don't already have something on the next project lined up, time to get your shit together.
Oh, the trouble with some unions in Aerospace is this: This guy is a highly experienced guy on the line. If he came to Seattle to work in the 737 or the wide body (747, 767, 787, 777) plant, the local IAM would say, uh huh....nice you've worked there for 40 years in that other union....that gets you zero seniority here - start bottom scale on the shit shifts. The guy was trapped in Long Beach, even if he could read the writing on the wall and wanted to transfer north.
Even though the engineers in Seattle are also unionized, if an experienced C-17 engineer (say 25 years) came to Seattle (they're NOT unionized in Long Beach) and got a job at the appropriate level, he or she would slot right in and have...well, we don't have seniority per se, but the transplant would be slotted in appropriate to their relative skill / value / worth, just as if they'd been a Seattle Engineers union person from day 1. In a layoff, they wouldn't necessarily be the first out the door, unlike our assembly worker who transferred - they're for all practical purposes 100% seniority driven.