Boeing kinda does this though. The fact that Boeing benefits accumulate based on time employed and not duration of employment is a nod to this.
They have a reputation for building a 'company within the company' for new plane models, which basically means there's a lot of vertical integration that goes on, and you will know a great deal about one airplane but maybe not much about any of the others. At the height of each cycle they have far more people than they can sustain. They seem like a huge company but they're market cap isn't that high. Yes, they have a bigger market cap than Detroit, but it's also been over 10 years since Apple had enough money its war chest to buy Boeing for cash.
So when a plane hits pre-production they start to get an itchy trigger finger. They get rid of the idiots and the non-essential people, and the non-essential people can hop onto the next thing in a couple of years.
They hired like mad for the 787, then did a round of R & D layoffs a while after the first flight. If I'm not mistaken the rampup of staff after that was to build all of the -8 planes which were basically redesigning their other planes with 787 tech.
So it seems the new triple-7 flew in January, so yep, time to trim again. Meanwhile all of those people on the 737-Max are probably furloughed, or retraining on another assembly line, and there would not be an infinite supply of those even without Covid.
It might be more noteworthy to look at how many people haven't been laid off in a lockdown situation. A long time ago, the powers that be in Washington state looked at traffic patterns around Puget Sound and realized that Boeing commuters were a large percentage of this traffic. Boeing has offices all over King County, but the project you work on might be at an office across town, and you might pass several offices on your way to work.
So they made a tax deal with Boeing to divert traffic rather than building more roads. My understanding is that as part of that Boeing allowed people to work from other branch offices, and while working from home wasn't encouraged, some bosses would let you get away with 1 day a week telecommuting. And I'm not sure when 4x10 and 9x9 schedules (four day workweek, 10 hours a day, or 9 day fortnight, 9 hours a day) came in, but those helped too.
Conference call software de rigeur, and whole disk encryption since before it was cool. There are a lot of quite old building blocks in place for at least some departments to keep working without being in the same room.
Leaving Boeing stops the benefits clock instead of resetting it.
A lot of old companies had benefit carrots designed to keep you from leaving, so those benefits come on work anniversaries, rather than cumulative years of service. If you leave at 4 years to start your own company and then get bought or come back, tough luck, you start over.
If you worked at Boeing off and on for your whole career you'd still be in the pension program, even if you kept leaving every 4 years to do something else.
They have a reputation for building a 'company within the company' for new plane models, which basically means there's a lot of vertical integration that goes on, and you will know a great deal about one airplane but maybe not much about any of the others. At the height of each cycle they have far more people than they can sustain. They seem like a huge company but they're market cap isn't that high. Yes, they have a bigger market cap than Detroit, but it's also been over 10 years since Apple had enough money its war chest to buy Boeing for cash.
So when a plane hits pre-production they start to get an itchy trigger finger. They get rid of the idiots and the non-essential people, and the non-essential people can hop onto the next thing in a couple of years.
There's a graph in this article that illustrates:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/in-go...
They hired like mad for the 787, then did a round of R & D layoffs a while after the first flight. If I'm not mistaken the rampup of staff after that was to build all of the -8 planes which were basically redesigning their other planes with 787 tech.
So it seems the new triple-7 flew in January, so yep, time to trim again. Meanwhile all of those people on the 737-Max are probably furloughed, or retraining on another assembly line, and there would not be an infinite supply of those even without Covid.
It might be more noteworthy to look at how many people haven't been laid off in a lockdown situation. A long time ago, the powers that be in Washington state looked at traffic patterns around Puget Sound and realized that Boeing commuters were a large percentage of this traffic. Boeing has offices all over King County, but the project you work on might be at an office across town, and you might pass several offices on your way to work.
So they made a tax deal with Boeing to divert traffic rather than building more roads. My understanding is that as part of that Boeing allowed people to work from other branch offices, and while working from home wasn't encouraged, some bosses would let you get away with 1 day a week telecommuting. And I'm not sure when 4x10 and 9x9 schedules (four day workweek, 10 hours a day, or 9 day fortnight, 9 hours a day) came in, but those helped too.
Conference call software de rigeur, and whole disk encryption since before it was cool. There are a lot of quite old building blocks in place for at least some departments to keep working without being in the same room.