Boeing to Eliminate 11% of Work Force at Orange County Plant
Boeing Co. said Monday that it will erase up to 900 jobs in Huntington Beach in the next 15 months, as the company shifts work on the Delta rocket production and C-17 military aircraft to Colorado and Alabama.
Boeing, Southern California’s largest private employer, said the reduction in Huntington Beach is part of a consolidation of manufacturing operations that began in 1998, shortly after the Seattle-based company acquired rival McDonnell Douglas.
The cutbacks represent up to 11% of Boeing’s 7,940 workers in Huntington Beach, and will add to the latest hemorrhaging of aerospace work in the Southland. In the last 12 months, about 12,000 aerospace jobs have been lost in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
The job cuts in Huntington Beach will begin as early as July and are expected be completed by the second quarter of 2002.
“This is it,” said a dejected Richard Braeutigan, a manufacturing engineer at the plant for four years. Braeutigan, 52, was previously laid off from General Dynamics in San Diego, and he had been commuting 120 miles each way to his current workplace.
“I anticipate getting a notice and I don’t anticipate getting a job anywhere else,” he said Monday as he walked away from the 229-acre Huntington Beach site, where Boeing manages the Delta family of rockets and works on the International Space Station.
Boeing’s work on the space shuttle program in Huntington Beach will not be affected. Shares of Seattle-based Boeing closed Monday at $39.75 on the New York Stock Exchange, down 13 cents. The announcement was made after the markets closed.
Boeing said it will transfer most of its production of Delta rockets, which are used for satellite launches, to Pueblo, Colo., and to Decatur, Ala., where it built a rocket plant last year.
Boeing said that Delta production has been cut in half since January 1999 because of a downturn in demand for launch services. The company said its Delta facilities were underutilized. “We just had too much capacity,” said Gale Schluter, vice president and general manager of the Boeing unit in Huntington Beach that makes the Delta rockets.
The company also has had difficulties with failed launches of certain Delta rockets. The Delta has been a workhorse for NASA, the Air Force and commercial customers, but failures in the new Delta III indicated Boeing’s possible vulnerability to competitive launchers made by other companies, including Lockheed Martin and Arianespace of Europe.
Boeing said that, in transferring work on the C-17 military transport jet from Huntington Beach, it would be unable to meet “cost commitments” that the Long Beach facility had made to the Air Force over the past several years. The C-17 is assembled in Long Beach. Some of its parts are made in Huntington Beach.
About half of the 600 production jobs to be eliminated will be associated with C-17 manufacturing and the other half from the Delta realignment. In addition, up to 300 positions will be eliminated in related support work, quality control and the management of supplies, Boeing said.
Schluter said the shift of operations was not a sudden decision by the company, which had already acknowledged that Huntington Beach would not be one of the “strategic manufacturing centers” in which Boeing would invest heavily. Schluter said employees were notified about the job cuts Monday morning and that Boeing will try to help workers find jobs in the area.
The aerospace industry still employs about 236,000 workers in Southern California, but Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., rued the loss of hundreds of jobs that pay good wages. State figures show aircraft and space missile production jobs in Orange County pay, on average, more than $40,000 a year.
“This is just another example of middle-class jobs disappearing,” Kyser said.
