Boeing to lay off 17,000 people after staff strikes and financial losses

Boeing plans to lay off about 10% of its workers in the coming months, about 17,000 people, as it continues to lose money and tries to deal with a strike that is crippling production of the company’s best-selling airline planes.

New CEO Kelly Ortberg told staff in a memo on Friday that the job cuts will include executives, managers and employees. The announcement started with Mr Ortega saying the company was in “a difficult position”.

The company has about 170,000 employees worldwide, many of them working in manufacturing facilities in the states of Washington and South Carolina.

Boeing had already imposed rolling temporary furloughs, but Mr Ortberg said those will be suspended because of the impending layoffs.

The company will further delay the rollout of a new plane, the 777X, to 2026 instead of 2025. It will also stop building the cargo version of its 767 jet in 2027 after finishing current orders.

Boeing has lost more than $25 billion (£19.1 billion) since the start of 2019.

About 33,000 union machinists have been on strike since September 14. Two days of talks this week failed to produce a deal, and Boeing filed an unfair-labour-practices charge against the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

The new CEO faces many challenges to turn the company around.

The Federal Aviation Administration increased scrutiny of the company after a panel blew out of a Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. Boeing has agreed to plead guilty and pay a fine for conspiracy to commit fraud tied to the Max, but relatives of the 346 people who died in two Max crashes want tougher punishment.

And Boeing got attention for all the wrong reasons when NASA decided that a Boeing spacecraft wasn’t safe enough to carry two astronauts home from the International Space Station.