Boeing plans to cut nearly 2,000 jobs in their human resources and finance departments in 2023.
In 2020, the company laid off more than 20,000 workers during the pandemic since the need for air travel declined heavily. These layoffs brought the company to a total workforce of 141,000, but the workforce has since recovered to an extent. The Boeing workforce is currently 156,000.
Despite cutting a significant number of jobs in those departments, the company is still planning to hire 10,000 employees in engineering and manufacturing. Boeing released information regarding the layoffs in a statement they made on Monday.
“We expect about 2,000 reductions primarily in Finance and HR through a combination of attrition and layoffs,” Boeing said in a statement Monday, as reported by PBS NewsHour. “While no one has been notified of job loss, we will continue to share information transparently to allow people to plan.”
“We grew Boeing’s workforce by 15,000 last year and plan to hire another 10,000 employees this year with a focus on engineering and manufacturing,” the statement continued, as reported by PBS NewsHour.
It is expected that roughly 1,500 of the jobs will be from the finance department, with the other 400 coming from the human resources department. These layoffs result in approximately a quarter of the finance department, which has roughly 5,800 workers, and about 15% of the human resources department. The Seattle Times reported that Boeing plans to outsource nearly a third of those jobs to Tata Consulting Services in Bengaluru, India.
Mike Friedman, a senior director of communications at Boeing, said the rest of the jobs will disappear as they reduce services.
“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, as reported by The Seattle Times. “So, we’re streamlining.”