While it doesn't say, these are likely very significantly manufacturing jobs, of course they'll come back. Orders are gone, cancelled, 737-MAX is stalled until the regulatory bits are done sorting out later this year, maintenance needs are way down, so you end up with empty or much slowed factories.
Boeing lays off a quarter of its workforce once or twice a decade. Airplanes are big, long term investments (big airliners tend to live to the ripe old age of 30 or so) and the demand and sale of them comes and goes with the global economy. The economy slows periodically, orders dry up, and factory workers don't have any work for a long time (or more like the years long order queue gets quite a bit shorter with old orders cancelled and few new orders coming in). It's a cyclical business that can't help but to make significant adjustments to its workforce.
A brief, incomplete and possibly inaccurate history of Boeing layoffs:
Boeing lays off a quarter of its workforce once or twice a decade. Airplanes are big, long term investments (big airliners tend to live to the ripe old age of 30 or so) and the demand and sale of them comes and goes with the global economy. The economy slows periodically, orders dry up, and factory workers don't have any work for a long time (or more like the years long order queue gets quite a bit shorter with old orders cancelled and few new orders coming in). It's a cyclical business that can't help but to make significant adjustments to its workforce.
A brief, incomplete and possibly inaccurate history of Boeing layoffs:
* 31,000 September 2001
* 28,000 December 1998
* 28,000 1992
* 2,160 2012