Boeing plans to lay off 360 employees at three of its Southern California locations by Jan. 1, bringing total job losses for 2014 to more than 1,600.
Ninety-eight jobs will be lost in El Segundo, home to Boeing’s satellite division, 137 in Long Beach and 125 in Huntington Beach.
By Jan. 23, another 53 jobs in El Segundo, 95 in Long Beach and 29 in Huntington Beach will be cut.
The layoffs were posted to the California Employment Development Department’s website, as required under the WARN Act, which forces companies to warn communities in advance of significant layoffs.
By January 2015, Boeing will have cut 1,629 jobs in the region, 300 of which were based in the South Bay.
Almost half of the layoffs are coming out of Long Beach, where Boeing will end production of its C-17 Globemaster cargo plane by next fall. The factory closure is affecting about 2,200 employees.
“We’re losing about 100 employees a month,” said Randy Sossaman, president of the United Aerospace Workers Local 148, which represents the hourly employees working on the C-17.
The last C-17 is making its way through the factory and teams of employees are being laid off as they finish their work.
Boeing announced in April that it plans to relocate about 1,000 engineering jobs to facilities in Seal Beach and Long Beach over a two-year period.
The company opened a customer support call center in Seal Beach in September. The center will provide technical support for airlines that operate 13,000 commercial Boeing planes around the world.
Boeing employs about 19,000 workers in California.
In a statement, a Boeing spokesman said the company “carefully links its employment levels to business requirements.”
“These employee layoffs are being driven by the difficult business and economic conditions that all companies have been experiencing,” spokesman Stephen M. Davis said. “Employment reductions, where they occur, are in response to specific requirements in specific segments of our business.”
The company, he said, has “followed all contractually required provisions when reducing employment levels in our union-represented workforce” and provided career transition assistance to employees.
Sossaman, who conducts final inspections on the C-17 aircraft, will be about a year and a half shy of 55 when the plant closes next fall, which means he’ll lose out of medical benefits and full retirement pay.
He said he’s been applying for other jobs, inside Boeing and elsewhere, but hasn’t had much luck.
“It’s hard. People don’t want to hire people in their 50s,” Sossaman said. “I feel like I got penalized because I was born too late.”
Story: http://www.presstelegram.com
http://www.edd.ca.gov
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