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Boeing To Lay Off Hundreds of Engineers Amid Sales Slowdown (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, Boeing has warned its employees that it "planned another round of involuntary layoffs that would affect hundreds of engineers at its commercial airplanes unit." From the report: The latest job cuts followed a prior involuntary reduction of 245 workers set for May 19 as the company responded to increasing competition and slowing aircraft sales. The additional layoffs are due to start June 23, according to the memo from John Hamilton, vice president of engineering at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. "We are moving forward with a second phase of involuntary layoffs for some select skills in Washington state and other enterprise locations," the memo said. "We anticipate this will impact hundreds of engineering employees. Additional reductions in engineering later this year will be driven by our business environment and the amount of voluntary attrition."
I wonder how this report squares with the one from late February that "Boeing and Airbus Can't Make Enough Airplanes To Keep Up With Demand". Poor workforce management? One of these two stories must misrepresent the truth.
It isn't really that the engineers get fired first; more like they don't even hire other disciplines now. The rest are outsourced to local manufacturers, or contracted workers through external companies, so it doesn't make the news when those reductions happen. Years ago Boeing manufactured a much larger percentage of their airplanes than they do now, and had a larger fraction of their administrative (e.g.) work done by employees.
There has never been, and never will be, a shortage of engineers.
There is, however, a surplus of greed and stupidity amongst the 1% that means people with decades of experience and education are forced to run around like dogs on the street looking for work. Meanwhile none of the 'shareholder activists' and C level executives will ever feel even the slightest ounce of pain, regardless of how many failures they create.
There was no purpose in winning the cold war - we have replicated the worst parts of the Soviet Union all by ourselves.
Idiot the complaint dealt with the contemporaneous actual 100% real threat form Boeing to move the production line. Read the god damn web page.
I have studied aeronautics and I was told that U.S. aeronautical engineers were called "gypsies". All the U.S. aircraft were designed by the same team of engineers, who were hired for a design job, fired afterwards and therefore went from factory to factory to be able to make a living. For us European students, it was totally absurd that you would have to spend a large part of your life studying and still end up as a dragged-around gypsy.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!