BOEING TO ELIMINATE JOBS AT REGION'S SATELLITE PLANTS.Byline: Staff and Wire Services Boeing (language) BOEING - An early system on the IBM 1130. [Listed in CACM 2(5):16, May 1959]. Co. said Thursday that it will lay off about 1,000 people from its satellite manufacturing arm in Southern California Southern California, also colloquially known as SoCal, is the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. Centered on the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego, Southern California is home to nearly 24 million people and is the nation's second most populated region, as it restructures to deal with tough competition in the uncertain economy. The announcement came four months after Boeing cut 400 other jobs at the satellite division because of the slowing economy. The reduction will not affect work at the company's Rocketdyne plant in Canoga Park. Boeing has slashed slash v. slashed, slash·ing, slash·es v.tr. 1. To cut or form by cutting with forceful sweeping strokes: slash a path through the underbrush. 2. more than 15,000 jobs nationwide and plans to cut as many as 30,000 jobs, or about 30 percent of its commercial aircraft work force. The new round of cuts includes reductions in manufacturing and support personnel along with some engineering positions at Boeing facilities in El Segundo El Segundo (ĕl sēgŭn`dō), industrial city (1990 pop. 15,223), Los Angeles co., S Calif., on Santa Monica Bay; inc. 1917. Its products include navigation and computer systems, aircraft parts, office machines, telephone apparatus, and and Torrance, said company spokesman George Torres. ``We are restructuring restructuring - The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics). in general to be more competitive in a very tough market,'' he said. Boeing acquired the satellite business, which employs about 9,200 people, last year. The unit is the world's largest producer of satellites for military and commercial markets. The weak economy has slowed orders from commercial customers, Torres said. The struggling telecommunications Communicating information, including data, text, pictures, voice and video over long distance. See communications. industry saw a number of companies such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Global Crossing Ltd. falter financially. Many of those companies were looking to use satellites to help build global wireless communication systems and space-based broadband broadband Term describing the radiation from a source that produces a broad, continuous spectrum of frequencies (contrasted with a laser, which produces a single frequency or very narrow range of frequencies). systems for the Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the . ``They (Boeing) have been building a satellite a month for a long time, but they're looking at the future. They're not seeing the kind of orders they've had,'' said Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst with the aerospace research firm the Teal Group, Boeing hopes the final cuts in Southern California will involve no more than 700 people through efforts to reassign workers to 350 current openings and encourage others to retire early, Torres said. But getting a transfer can be tough. ``When you try to match skills with other parts of Boeing, most of the openings are on the engineering side,'' he said. ``There aren't as many in manufacturing.'' Torres said Boeing remains committed to expanding its satellite business. The company intends to proceed with plans for a 35,000-square-feet addition to its El Segundo satellite factory and continue pursuing new military business that could create about 1,300 new jobs by 2005. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: Employees head out for lunch Thursday at Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo. Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press |
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