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."

Comments

Two months ago "Couldn't keep up with demand"

[aratuk]

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.

Re: Two months ago "Couldn't keep up with demand"

[ghoul]

Part of that is the long lead times for Airlines. Engineers would be needed now to be designing a new plane which would enter manufacturing 5-10 years from now. There may be enough manufacturing demand for the existing planes but not enough demand for a new plane. Actually since its pretty much impossible to forecast demand 10 years in the future most new planes are gambles and Boeing is not feeling flush enough to take the gamble. Things like Trump pissing off the rest of the world which takes away a large chunk of Boeings potential customers play into that. But other factors like China and Russia coming out with good enough alternatives meaning many of the middle income country markets will shift away from Boeing and Airbus in the 5-10 year timeframe.

Re:Hmz....

[Fringe]

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.

Is this news?

[Errol backfiring]

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.