After tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, US-based aerospace company Boeing has now announced plans to lay off around 2,000 workers in finance and human resources this year.
The company confirmed it to multiple news outlets, becoming the latest US company to implement job cuts as fears of recession linger overhead.
In a statement, the company announced 2,000 reductions primarily in finance and human resources through a combination of attrition and layoffs.
“While no one has been notified of job loss, we will continue to share information transparently to allow people to plan. The company, which recently relocated its headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, said it expects to “significantly grow” the overall workforce during the year,” the statement said.
“We grew Boeing’s workforce by 15,000 last year and plan to hire another 10,000 employees this year with a focus on engineering and manufacturing.”
A report in The Seattle Times said Boeing, one of the largest private employers in Washington state, plans to outsource about a third of the eliminated positions to Tata Consulting Services in the Indian city of Bengaluru, known as the country’s tech hub.
“Over time, some of our corporate functions have grown quite large. And with that growth tends to come bureaucracy or disparate systems that are inefficient,” Mike Friedman, a senior director of communications, told the newspaper.
The report noted that about 1,500 of the company’s approximately 5,800 finance positions will be cut, with up to 400 more job cuts in human resources, which is about 15 percent of the department’s total staff.
Boeing acknowledged that it would “reduce staffing in some support functions” in an effort to better align resources with current products and technologies, adding that it planned to cut about 150 finance jobs in the US to “continue to simplify our corporate structure.”
Apart from Boeing, many other American companies have announced job cuts as they try to overcome the impact of inflation and post-COVID recessions.
On Monday, Texas-headquartered Dell Technologies, which owns PC-maker Dell, cited “uncertain” market conditions to lay off 5 percent of its workforce, or about 6,650 employees.
Earlier this week, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon unveiled plans to reduce the tech company’s workforce by 5 percent (roughly 300 positions), citing a period of over-hiring over the past several years that did not account for the “macroeconomic reality we’re in today.”
NetApp, a California-based cloud data company, announced plans in an SEC filing to lay off 8 percent of its staff by the end of the fourth fiscal quarter of this year “in light of the macroeconomic challenges and reduced spending environment.”
Boston-based online sports betting company DraftKings also announced plans to cut 3.5 percent of its global workforce, the Boston Globe reported.
Last month, tech giant Microsoft announced its plans to shed 10,000 workers by the end of March, or nearly 5 percent of its staff.
Layoffs in the United States hit a more than two-year high last month as technology firms cut jobs at the second-highest pace on record to prepare for a possible recession, a report showed on Thursday.
Last year, the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose sharply, pointing to the shrinking labor market amid tighter monetary policies and financial conditions.
According to the US government data, inflation has surged to a four-decade high in the country, as prices continue to climb at the fastest pace across sectors.
