Boeing has laid off 2,199 workers in Washington so far, with an eventual loss of about 17,000 jobs across the company
SEATTLE– SEATTLE (AP) — Boeing said Monday in a notice filed with Washington’s Employment Security Department that it has laid off 2,199 workers in the state so far, in addition to job losses that will eventually total about 17,000 throughout the company.
The aerospace giant announced in October that it plans to cut about 10% of its workforce in the coming months as it struggles to recover from the crisis. financial and regulatory problems, as well as a strike by its engineers that lasted almost two months.
The planned cuts include workers at Boeing facilities across the country, from Washington to Missouri, Arizona and South Carolina. The Seattle Times reports this. They also appeared to affect employees in all three of Boeing’s divisions: commercial aircraft, defense and global services.
Before last week’s layoff announcements, Boeing had 66,000 employees in Washington.
Among the layoffs so far are notices sent last week more than 400 members of Boeing’s professional aerospace union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, or SPEEA. The employees will remain on the payroll until mid-January.
Boeing’s unionized machinists began returning to work earlier this month the strike.
The strike put pressure on Boeing’s finances. But CEO Kelly Ortberg said on a call with analysts in October that this was not the cause of the layoffs, which he described as a result of overstaffing.
Boeing, based in Arlington, Virginia, will be there financial problems since two crashes of the 737 Max aircraft killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019. The company’s fortunes and reputation took another blow when a panel blew the fuselage off from an Alaska Airlines plane in January.
Production rates slowed to a crawl, and the Federal Aviation Administration capped production of the 737 MAX at 38 planes per month, a threshold Boeing had yet to reach when the machinists’ strike shut down assembly lines.