The aircraft manufacturer Boeing, whose some 33,000 employees in the northwest of the United States have been on strike since September 13, will proceed “in the coming days” to partial technical layoffs, announced the group’s boss Kelly Ortberg on Wednesday.
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According to Boeing, this measure will affect several tens of thousands of employees located in the United States.
In a message to employees, Mr. Ortberg specified that, “to limit the impact” of this decision, the employees concerned will have, on a rotating basis, one week of technical unemployment every four weeks.
The group announced immediate measures on Monday to reduce its expenses and specified, among other things, that it was considering implementing temporary technical unemployment measures “in the coming weeks”.
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But “with production at a standstill on many critical programs in the Northwest, our company faces significant challenges and it is important that we take the difficult steps to preserve our cash flow and ensure Boeing is able to successfully recover,” Ortberg said Wednesday.
This partial technical unemployment measure will affect “a large number of managers, executives and employees based in the United States,” he noted.
He added that for the duration of the strike, he and the management team would give up “a share of their remuneration equivalent” to that lost by the staff placed on technical unemployment.
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The man who took over the reins of Boeing on August 8 assured that the group remained determined to “reset” its relationship with the striking staff and to continue negotiations to reach a collective agreement “as quickly as possible.”
The machinists’ union (IAM), which represents the strikers, said on Tuesday evening that the aircraft manufacturer was “not taking mediation seriously.”
Nearly 95 percent of members of IAM-District 751, the union’s Seattle-area branch, rejected on September 12 the proposed collective agreement that their negotiators and Boeing negotiators had been working on since March, and voted 96 percent to strike.
Negotiations resumed Tuesday in Seattle, under the auspices of federal mediation, to try to work out a new collective agreement. They are stumbling mainly over the size of the wage increase and on pensions.
