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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.