Boeing is ploughing ahead with the mass redundancies it announced in October, according to a notice filed with Washington’s Employment Security Department on 18 November 2024. The notice revealed that the aviation giant has so far let 2,199 employees in Washington State go, as part of moves that will eventually slash around 17,000 jobs.
Engineers and health and safety workers among staff laid off
Those 17,000 workers will eventually come from across Boeing’s commercial aviation, defence and services divisions and from all across the USA, says the Seattle Times. But the cuts filed in Washington up to last week affect over two thousand of the company’s 66,000 staff in the State, with towns such as Everett and Renton seeing the highest numbers of job losses. The cuts include over 400 members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) who will remain on payroll until mid-January. As well as engineers, human resource workers, office administrators, IT staff, and health and safety roles will go.
The inclusion of so many engineers and health and safety employees may raise question marks over health and safety practices and engineering quality that have shaken the US manufacturer to its core. Several recent years of troubles for the US manufacturer have seen faults on planes that caused fatal crashes, subsequent fleet groundings and federally-imposed limits on production rates, whistleblower accusations of poor engineering safety practices, lawsuits, and, most recently a strike by machinists.
$6.2 billion in losses in Q3
While the company has denied that the machinists’ industrial action had anything to do with the lay-offs, the suite of problems have all caused Boeing to suffer financial turbulence and regulatory challenges. Its latest financial reveal $6.2 billion of losses in Q3 of 2024 and a credit downgrade is looming.
How Boeing will recover when it is about to lose so much talent is a question many are asking. One worker laid off from Boeing’s South Carolina facility last week, noted that the lay-off decisions appeared to be taking place at a high level, and were being taken by people with little knowledge of workers’ strengths or impact on productivity. Describing the scene at the campus as “like a funeral home”, the staff member told the Seattle Times: “They don’t know who I am, or what I do, or how many people I help to do their job. There’s a lot of good talent that will be lost.”
