Seattle, Nov 21: Struggling us aircraft maker Boeing Co. Has said it would slash another 5,000 jobs in its commercial aircraft division next year as the global airline industry takes a nosedive. "These 5,000 job cuts announced for 2003 are in addition to the 1,200 to 1,500 reductions announced last month," said Bill Cogswell, a spokesman for the company's commercial airplanes division.
"We announced last year we were cutting 30,000 jobs worldwide in 2002 and we're on schedule ... As we expected our employment trend would ... Continue downward as a result of the continued downturn in our industry," he said.
"The cuts will be in all areas, hourly workers, salaried, engineers, non-union, managers and executives," he added. Most of the job cuts will take place in the region around the northwestern us city of Seattle.
The company hopes to make half the job cuts through attrition, but will begin sending out warning notices to the first of the staff targeted for redundancy today, another spokesman, Tom Brabant, said.
The cuts take the total number of proposed job losses to the aerospace giant's aircraft manufacturing arm to 35,000 since the us aviation industry went into a tailspin following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Boeing has deferred 500 aircraft deliveries since the end of 2001 at the request of battling airlines and production of its 757 and 767 models has been cut to around one aircraft a month, according to local media. Bureau Report