RTN Raytheon Co

By Doug Cameron 

Boeing Co. said Tuesday it would cut another 500 jobs over the next four years from its defense and space business by shrinking work at its Huntington Beach facility in California and closing two smaller plants in Texas and Virginia.

The aerospace company plans to transfer work on a range of military, space and commercial aircraft programs to existing facilities, cutting the amount of manufacturing and office space at its domestic plants by 4.5 million square feet from an existing total of around 80 million square feet, a trim of almost 6%.

The Pentagon has said the U.S. military has 20% more facility space than it needs, though Congress has opposed more base closures. Defense companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. have been cutting their own real estate holdings by around 10% in recent years.

Boeing's defense arm has cut thousands of jobs over the past five years, a faster pace than reductions at a commercial airplane arm that have climbed in recent months as it faced tougher competition from Airbus Group SE.

The U.S. company said it would offer some staff affected by the latest changes alternative opportunities at other sites in southern California as well as Missouri and Alabama that would result in 2,500 job additions at those facilities. Huntington Beach employs around 5,000 staff, a number that will also drop through natural attrition. Boeing also is closing sites in El Paso, Texas, and Newington, Va.

Boeing has cut almost 7,000 staff this year -- around 4% of its total workforce -- mainly through a mix of voluntary layoffs, attrition and some compulsory cuts at its commercial aircraft arm. The group's workforce fell 2.5% in 2015.

Write to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 15, 2016 20:03 ET (01:03 GMT)

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