At the end of last month, on the same day that Boeing touted plans to hire 10,000 people this year, senior leadership convened virtual meetings internally to break bad news to nonunion staff in human resources and finance.
Despite the growth elsewhere, those corporate positions will be slashed through substantial job cuts and layoffs.
“We expect about 2,000 reductions this year primarily in Finance and HR through a combination of attrition and layoffs,” Boeing confirmed Monday.
Boeing is outsourcing about a third of those jobs to Tata Consulting Services in Bengaluru, India.
The rest will disappear as Boeing reduces its finance and HR support services, according to Mike Friedman, a senior director of communications at Boeing.
“Over time, some of our corporate functions have grown quite large. And with that growth tends to come bureaucracy or disparate systems that are inefficient,” Friedman said. “So we’re streamlining.”
About 1,500 jobs will be cut in finance, about a quarter of the roughly 5,800 total companywide, and up to 400 more in HR, about 15% of the total there.
Staff in those organizations, many of them longtime employees, are shellshocked by the news that their jobs may be gone later this year.
