More Boeing layoffs

The aerospace giant, which took a $56 million hit in Q4 earnings (much of it related to last fall’s work stoppage), announced that 5,600 jobs would be eliminated. That's on top of 4,500 job cuts announced earlier this month. No specifics on where the layoffs are coming from, other than that they will be outside the company's commercial arm. A Boeing spokesman said "we wouldn't expect to see, relatively speaking, the kind of reductions in production and engineering as we would in overhead functions" (here's the AP story). Boeing is based in Chicago and still has much of its operations in Washington, but Socal remains an important center - and one of the area's bigger employers. Last month Boeing and L.A.-based Northrop lost out to Lockheed on a $1.1-billion contract to build a new generation of satellites. Boeing would have built those satellites in El Segundo (here's the LAT story). Government contracts come and go, regardless of what the economy is doing, but this loss was especially untimely.