Boeing layoffs to hit 5% of commercial airplane staff in December – Human Resources Director

A slower 737 Max production ramp leaves the planemaker overstaffed, with attrition and layoffs set to follow
Boeing is cutting about 5% of the workforce in its commercial airplanes division because production of the 737 Max is ramping up more slowly than planned. Stephanie Pope, chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle, told employees in a memo on Monday that the company will reduce headcount through attrition and involuntary layoffs, with notifications starting in December.
The Boeing layoffs will touch a division that employed 50,494 people as of December 2025, according to Boeing’s website. A 5% cut works out to about 2,500 jobs, though Boeing hasn’t given an exact count.
“As shared in our third-quarter earnings, we need to reset the pace of our production rate ramps to provide our factories and supply chain partners additional time to achieve stability,” Pope said in the memo, which Reuters reviewed. “Adjusting our production schedules and reducing aircraft output puts us in an overstaffed position.”
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told analysts last month that the company would miss its 737 production and delivery targets this year, Reuters reported. Boeing now expects to reach 47 jets a month in early 2027, after earlier projecting it would hit that pace by summer 2026. Ortberg said the company still plans to reach 52 planes a month in the second half of 2027.
Wing production has been a sticking point. Ortberg addressed it on last month’s earnings call.
“We’re not yet to where I can say we’re stably producing wings to support the 47 a month rate,” Ortberg said. “So we’re going to want to dwell on that for a little while to make sure we’re stable and don’t end up in an unstable situation with production.”
The slower pace follows a stated priority on stability. The New York Times noted that Boeing was long criticized for putting speed ahead of quality, and that Ortberg, who became CEO in the summer of 2024, has said the company will resist that pressure. The stakes are high because the 737 is Boeing’s largest cash generator, Reuters reported. Ortberg also said Boeing doesn’t expect to reach $10 billion in free cash flow until 2029, a year later than analysts had expected. The company has also struggled to lift 787 output from 8 jets a month to 10, and its 767 and 777 programs have been disrupted, Reuters reported.
The reductions will come partly from open positions left unfilled and partly from layoffs. Notices will go out in December at the earliest, Reuters reported, and Boeing is required in many states to give workers 60 days’ notice.
At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Labor says the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires covered employers to give 60 calendar days’ written notice before plant closings and mass layoffs. If that window applies to notices issued in early December, first exits would come no earlier than late January. The details reported so far don’t say when affected employees will leave the payroll.
This isn’t Boeing’s first round. Ortberg announced in October 2024 that the company would cut its global workforce by about 10%, or roughly 17,000 jobs. In that round, most laid-off employees stayed on payroll for about two months and received severance, career transition services and subsidized health insurance for up to three months, The Associated Press reported in December 2024. Coverage of the latest cuts doesn’t say whether the same terms apply.
Boeing has tied the cuts to production rates rather than technology. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm in Chicago, reported on Nov. 5 that U.S. employers announced 43,994 job cuts in October, and that market and economic conditions have overtaken AI as the top reason for 2026 cuts. HRD America has tracked how AI-cited cuts have dropped sharply since their May peak.
Several Boeing employees told Reuters they had feared layoffs before Monday’s announcement. The first notices are at least three weeks away, so those workers face a long wait.
The employees who stay carry a cost too. Joel Brockner, a professor of business at Columbia Business School in New York, told HRD America in July that people who remain after a substantial layoff are, on average, demoralized, demotivated and less productive for three or four months. He also said repeated rounds of cuts wear that morale down further.
Jie (Jasmine) Feng, an associate professor of Human Resource Management at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations in Piscataway, New Jersey, told HRD America in June that HR leaders should explain the criteria and reasoning behind layoffs. That means saying why the cuts happened, how decisions were made, what will change and whether more are expected.

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