The planemaker Airbus has announced plans to cut as many as 15,000 jobs – including 1,700 in the UK – as it warned the coronavirus pandemic had triggered the “gravest crisis” in its history, reports The Guardian.
The planned cuts represent almost 15% of the European aerospace company’s global workforce of 135,000, underlining the depth of the crisis hitting the aviation and aerospace industries. Airbus said the cuts would be made no later than 2021 after commercial aircraft business activity dropped by close to 40% in recent months.
The cuts will affect workers across Airbus’s major operations in France, Germany and Spain, as well as the UK operation making wings at Broughton, north Wales. The Welsh operation, which is expected to bear the brunt of UK job losses, employed about 6,000 workers before the crisis, with a total of 14,000 Airbus employees in the UK.
Germany was hardest hit, with 5,100 redundancies. Airbus plans 5,000 redundancies in France, 900 in Spain and 1,300 across the rest of the world.
“Airbus is facing the gravest crisis this industry has ever experienced,” said chief executive Guillaume Faury. “The measures we have taken so far have enabled us to absorb the initial shock of this global pandemic. Now we must ensure that we can sustain our enterprise and emerge from the crisis as a healthy, global aerospace leader, adjusting to the overwhelming challenges of our customers. To confront that reality, we must now adopt more far-reaching measures.”
Faury previously warned that the impact of the job cuts could fall more heavily on the UK after the French and German governments pledged to spend billions of euros to prop up their aerospace industries.