Boeing to Lay off 561 Employees in SoCal

Aviation titan Boeing Co. will lay off 561 employees across its Southern California operation centers by February of next year.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 253 people at Boeing’s Long Beach facilities will lose their jobs, while an additional 308 jobs will be cut at the company’s Huntington Beach and El Segundo outposts.

“Boeing carefully links its employment levels to business requirements,” company spokesman Stephen Davis explained to the Times. “These employee layoffs are being driven by the difficult business and economic conditions that all businesses have been experiencing.”

The Los Angeles Business Journal reports that 360 of the layoffs will come before the end of this year. The Times also discovered notices filed with the California Employment Development Department that reveal an additional 201 jobs will be eliminated in January and February 2015.

Davis told the paper that Boeing will provide “a variety of of career transition services” to help those who will lose their jobs.

Some employees working on the X-37B “secret space drone” will reportedly be moved to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, while the company previously announced that its Long Beach production facility would be shuttered. It is unclear how many of the layoffs are related to the closing of the Long Beach facility.

The layoffs come after the Seattle Times reported Tuesday that Boeing will reduce the number of 747-8 aircraft it manufactures annually from 18 to 16, the third such cutback announced in just two years. The 747-8 is the company’s largest aircraft, available in both passenger and cargo models. According to the report, the Pentagon is considering an order for two 747-8 aircraft to replace the aging Air Force One 747 models.