By Rich Plunkett
SPEEA Director of Strategic Development
On Oct. 11, 2024, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg released a message to employees announcing a reduction in force as part of his vision for “Positioning for the Future.”
His announcement said a 10% reduction in employment was necessary to achieve business goals, including to “ensure we stay competitive” and to “focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are, rather than spreading ourselves across too many efforts.”
Nowhere in the message was there mention of Boeing having an excess of employees for the backlog of work at hand.
This edict from the new CEO appears to have flowed down to working-level managers with little to no resistance along the way. The announcement left line managers scrambling to figure out how to accomplish the work assigned to their teams with fewer people.
Adding to the chaos, this reduction in force (or RIF) included a “non-working RIF” component that our union had not seen before at Boeing.
Instead of SPEEA-represented engineers and technical workers who were facing layoffs having 60 days to finish out their projects and assignments or hand them off to colleagues, laid-off workers were told within days to turn in their Boeing-issued equipment, and they had their internal communications tools severed. Then they were shoved out the door.
This has resulted in scores of laid-off SPEEA members calling our union halls asking for advice on who they could inform about the status of the work they were doing for Boeing, including updating managers on what tasks had been finished and which were still in progress.
It almost seems like the SPEEA members who are leaving Boeing care more about the work they’d been assigned to do than the company does itself.
In addition, we’ve received reports from SPEEA members that suggest some Boeing managers are attempting to exploit what they see as loopholes in the SPEEA contracts.
In some instances, Boeing managers are attempting to keep laid-off SPEEA members on the job by shuffling people between accounting columns.
Some SPEEA-represented employees facing layoff have been told that they could continue to perform their work at Boeing – albeit for lesser pay. They’ve been told to apply for work with a third-party employment contractor, which has been providing workers to Boeing under a Purchased Service contract. This third-party contractor then would send the laid-off SPEEA member back to Boeing.
This contractor is a multi-national, technology outsourcing corporation based in India that is largely dependent upon H-1B visas.
Also, a handful of managers have tried to use the layoffs as an opportunity to purge their ranks of employees who have asked too many questions – even when those employees are members of Boeing’s elite cadre of engineers in the Boeing Technical Fellowship program.
SPEEA is currently investigating some of these layoffs as likely violations of our union’s contracts with Boeing. We’ve alerted Boeing’s Labor Relations leaders to these problems. Based on the responses we’ve received; it appears likely our union will have to go to arbitration to get these contract violations overturned.
While the outcome of any arbitration is at least six to 12 months away, SPEEA-represented Boeing workers are expressing sincere fear in the workplace NOW. They believe if they speak up in any meaningful way about a quality or safety issue, they will be laid off, too.
This, obviously, is antithetical to building a robust safety culture at Boeing.
Finally, some of the work that was being performed by SPEEA members who are now facing layoffs is being sent to Boeing facilities outside the United States – the Boeing India Engineering & Technology Center in particular – where Boeing employees earn significantly less than their American counterparts.
These overseas work transfers should trigger the protocols covered in Letter of Understanding 28, “Relating to Work Movement” in SPEEA’s contracts.
However, Boeing Labor Relations leaders say they are “not aware” of any such work movement, despite a growing body of reports documenting the transfers. This, too, seems like a case that will require an arbitration ruling to correct a contract violation.
In the meantime, Boeing employees are receiving the clear message that cheaper labor in the name of cost reductions is far more real than any safety culture improvements proclaimed by executives.
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