Boeing to lay off 115 Long Beach workers, more than 500 statewide

Aerospace and defense giant Boeing continues to struggle, now announcing more than 500 layoffs across California, including 115 workers in Long Beach.

The company issued a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, notice to the California Employment Development Department last month outlining the layoffs, which also include 179 workers across two Seal Beach facilities, 144 in El Segundo, 57 in Huntington Beach and a combined 38 in other cities.

“As we announced in early October, we are adjusting our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and a more focused set of priorities,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Most employees will leave the company two months after being notified of the layoffs, with eligible workers receiving severance pay, career transition help and subsidized health care benefits for up to three months after exiting the company, according to Boeing.

“We are committed to ensuring our employees have support during this challenging time,” the company added.

It’s unclear which departments are affected and to what extent, but in an Oct. 11 message to workers, Boeing President and CEO Kelly Ortberg said the “reductions will include executives, managers and employees.”

In a statement to the Watchdog Tuesday, Mayor Rex Richardson said the city is aware of the layoffs.

“We are working in tandem with Boeing and have assembled a team including our Economic Development staff and our Workforce Development board with the goal of connecting impacted workers to employment opportunities in Long Beach’s growing aerospace and advanced manufacturing sectors,” Richardson said.

In recent years, the city has supported workers laid off by other aerospace companies, including Gulf Stream and Virgin Orbit, connecting them to jobs at other outfits within the sector such as Rocket Lab and Vast.

In all, Boeing plans to lay off 533 workers as early as Jan. 17, according to the WARN notice, which was filed on Nov. 15 — one month after Ortberg announced Boeing would slash its workforce by 10%.

During an Oct. 23 earnings call, Ortberg said Boeing is “at a crossroads.”

“The trust in our company has eroded,” he said. “We’re saddled with too much debt. We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company, which have disappointed many of our customers.”

In the first half of 2024, Boeing airplane orders were down 71% from the previous year, according to San Antonio-based Hill Law Firm.

In Oct. 2018 and March 2019, Boeing 737 Max 8s crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, respectively, killing a combined 346. The incidents resulted in the ousting of Boeing's CEO Dennis Muilenburg and a $2.5 billion settlements for fraud charges, tarnishing Boeing's standings in the aviation community.

During the first week of the year, the rear door of a Boeing 737 Max 9 passenger jet flew off, landing in the backyard of a high school science teacher. The accident grounded all similarly configured 737 Max 9s for weeks. The fallout from the resulting investigation forced the resignation of CEO David Calhoun as well as the company pleading guilty in July to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

(A full timeline of Boeing 737 Max's troubled history from the Associated Press.)

During the call, the company reported $6 billion in losses for the third quarter, bringing the total net losses for the first nine months of the year to $8 billion.

The layoffs come just over a year after Boeing announced it would move an estimated 250 C-17-related jobs from Long Beach to other regions, including cities in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida. At the time, the company had about 2,000 employees at its Long Beach campus.