Credit to Eashaan Patel

Boeing Building 100 is one of many places owned by Boeing in order to help streamline their aircraft construction. You can tour the James McDonnell Prologue Room inside Boeing Building 100 in order to learn more about the history of aerospace engineering.

Due in part to the massive machinist strike that ended in November, Boeing has started laying off many workers across the country. Boeing has been undergoing financial strife due to a lengthy series of events. To reconcile their lack of cash, Boeing is resorting to laying off employees.

“[My family] kind of already predicted that it’s probably going to get worse,” senior Matthew Baur, whose mother works at Boeing, said. “But we’ve planned for it way in the past that something like this was going to happen because of different things that have been going on in the company and companies around us that we work with.”

These impacts are major with around 10% of Boeing’s staff nationwide being affected. Boeing employs more than 15,000 workers in the St. Louis area, making it one of the top employers in the region. These mass layoffs are affecting employees indiscriminately of their position, so practically everyone is at risk.

“I didn’t know about it until recently,” Valentino Sorsby, whose father works at Boeing, said. “We talked about it before and we thought my dad would probably be able to find another job, easily.”

The risk of losing a job means that families need to plan for the worst. There are fears that more layoffs will be coming if things do not get better at Boeing internally. Communication about the layoffs has been shallow from Boeing.

“I wish I could give you, like a great inside info, but we’re all in the dark,” David Sorsby, a Boeing employee, said. “There’s a lot of fear at Boeing right now.”

For the workers employed by Boeing, there is no easy detour. Boeing is one of very few military contractors in the region, which means that many people who are laid off will have to transition to new sectors or move to somewhere else with more job opportunities for their skill sets.

“I have a military background and I worked for a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security where I got a top secret clearance, and I was able to leverage that into employment with Boeing,” David said. “My soft skills as a leader, as a team lead, would absolutely transfer to any corporate role, but the specialized skill set of Department of Defense personnel security, that’s really just DoD contractors, and the DoD itself.”

The origin of Boeing’s troubles goes back many years, but the cause of the strike mostly originated from the newfound attention pushed onto Boeing due to the issues with quality control. There was an uptick of high-profile plane crashes from Boeing 747s. These high profile crashes gave the machinists’ union the perfect opportunity to go on strike. The strike ended on Nov. 4 with the machinists not getting their union, but managing to achieve a 38% pay increase for the union members over the next four years.

“It’s manufacturing, they want their pension back,” Baur said. “They used to have a pension, but old people years ago voted to not have a pension, basically screwing over the younger generation. And the problem is, if [Boeing] lets them get their pension back, that might cause other unions that don’t have theirs to strike and start asking for theirs back.”

Boeing is mostly split between people working in the commercial sector and people working on government defense contracts. When the machinist union went on strike, this led to the commercial side of Boeing losing a lot of liquidity.

“They’re unhappy, but they understand what the company’s going through,” Baur said. “They’ve been with them through the ups and downs. They’ve been working there for over 25 years.