From the company’s humble beginnings as a maker of snowmobiles in 1942, Bombardier has grown to a manufacturing industry giant with its current two main divisions of Aerospace and Transportation. Bombardier wrestles with the Brazilian Embraer for third place behind Boeing and Airbus for the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world, and stands as the largest rail equipment manufacturing and servicing company.
Despite this impressive resume, all is not well for workers of the company who are being subject to job cuts in the order of 1 700 positions. An internal memo was released to employees two weeks ago citing product delays, a “tough market,” and the company’s need to save money as the reasons for the upcoming terminations. 1 100 of the 1 700 job cuts took place in Canada with 80 per cent of those occurring in Montreal. Of the 1 700 jobs, 300 were cut in December. Bombardier Aerospace employs 35 000 people globally and these layoffs will represent about five per cent cut of the workforce
A Bombardier spokesperson announced that the cuts are not a direct result of the struggles of any one program, although it would seem foolish not to point out the delays associated with the release of their new CSeries aircrafts. The CS100 and CS300 are part of the CSeries of medium range jet airliners manufactured by Bombardier and are expected to burn 20 percent less fuel than their competition once put into operation. The release will now be delayed until the second half of 2015, which is months after their already delayed release date.
David Chartrand of the Machinists Union reports that the jobs being cut include 300 contractors, hundreds of engineers, temporary employees and others hired to work on special projects. The Ottawa Citizen states that positions affected include contractual, permanent, unionized, and management. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the aerospace industry took a big hit and Bombardier was forced to lay off 3 700 machinists, roughly 1 100 of whom were later rehired. This round of job cuts seems to be different though, with layoffs occurring across disciplines; everyone is affected, including production, engineering sales, and product support divisions.
One of the reasons cited for the delay of the CSeries Jet has been software system integration issues, which may be reason to believe a number of these layoffs may be temporary, at least in terms of engineers and machinists. In order to cut manufacturing costs during the delay, bombardier has “trimmed” many of the employees whose jobs were focused on the CSeries jets but are not responsible for the final steps leading up to product release. Unfortunately, in contrast to this point is the looming fact that Bombardier reported receiving 19 per cent fewer orders last year than in 2012, meaning that there simply may not be enough work to sustain a number of project-based employees.
Analysts have called these layoffs “prudent,” or acting with care for the future, but the aerospace industry is and will continue to be a “tough market.” Bombardier will have a tough time keeping worker morale high if they issue mass layoffs every time they come across a bump in the road.
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