Boeing’s simmering confrontation with its older workers gets hotter

President Obama meets with Boeing workers

“Diversifying our engineering workforce reflects changes in our business and is not related to the age of our employees,” Boeing said in an emailed statement.

That’s not how workers see it. During the implementation of 2,500 layoffs in the past year, a handful of whistleblowing managers alerted the Society of Professional Engineering
Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) of possible bias, according to Roy Goforth, executive director of the union. In addition to those layoffs, the company announced in April that it
will be laying off another 1,000 people in the Puget Sound area by the end of 2015 as part of a shift of some engineering work to Southern California.