Boeing's announcement that it is eliminating 900 jobs in Long Beach is getting the big headlines today, but the once-mighty aerospace company also dropped some bad employment news for Orange County.
]
Boeing also notified the state it will cut an additional 98
workers this month in Huntington Beach and 47 in
Anaheim, The Orange County Register reports.
Production deals with India and Kuwait for C-17 military-transport planes announced in 2010 obviously were not enough to maintain employment levels in Long Beach, where 20,000 workers once toiled, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, which pegs the current force at about 7,000.
About 1,000 Boeing jobs in Long Beach were outsourced in 2010, a year when 160 jobs at the Boeing helicopter plant in Irvine were sent to Arizona and 80 positions were eliminated in the engineering, operations and technology division in Seal Beach.
Boeing announced in November it is closing a
300,000-square-foot Carson site after nearly 20 years, eliminating more than 160 jobs in the process. That work will be outsourced to a contractor in Santa Fe Springs.
The local cuts will reportedly be made “across the board,” eliminating accountants, assembly workers, mid-level management, and engineering
and research posts.
Affected workers will receive 60-day notices beginning Friday, and layoffs will be staggered monthly through late 2012.
About 200 positions at
C-17 sub-assembly plants in Georgia, Arizona and Missouri will be
eliminated by late 2012, Boeing also announced.
“People are obviously devastated,” Stan Klemchuck, president of United Aerospace Workers Local 148 that represents about 1,700 Long Beach workers, reportedly told the Press-Telegram. “Between this and
recent layoffs at the (Carson) warehouse facility, it's been
overwhelming. The jobs are just drying up.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.