Boeing Tries to Bury 17,000 Layoffs in Friday News Dump Extraordinaire
Boeing announced 17,000 layoffs, a delay to the launch of its 777X passenger jet, and billions in charges related to ongoing strikes.

The idea behind putting out a press release with bad news at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday is fewer headlines, less attention. But you can’t sneak past this newsletter, even if it’s just more bad news about Boeing.
The embattled aviation giant put the so-called Friday News Dump trick to the test over the weekend, announcing a mammoth 17,000 layoffs, a year delay to the launch of its 777X passenger jet, and billions in charges related to ongoing labor strikes just after New York markets closed.
History Not Worth Making
Boeing’s woes are too many to list at this point: technical failures, production delays, three CEOs in less than five years. When Boeing pleaded guilty in July to fraud charges related to deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, The Economist dubbed it the “corporate equivalent of a criminal.”
The latest bad news comes down to deteriorating financials: Boeing said it expects its Commercial Airlines division to book pre-tax charges of $3 billion in the third quarter, and its Defense business to write down another $2 billion. The company put part of the blame on the 33,000 union machinists who have been on strike for around a month demanding better compensation. “Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together,” CEO Kelly Ortberg said in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs, amounting to 10% of its workforce. Things could get uglier still:
- S&P Global ratings, which estimates Boeing is losing $1 billion per month on the strike, put the company on CreditWatch Negative last week, which is how ratings agencies let you know they’re thinking about downgrading your debt to junk. If two of the three major ratings agencies did that, the lion’s share of Boeing’s $58 billion in debt (as of the second quarter) would be removed from investment-grade indices, meaning they’d be stuck paying higher yields to investors.
- JPMorgan said in a note that Boeing could “become the largest fallen angel on record,” referring to a term for one-time investment-grade issuers that end up with a junk rating, noting a junk downgrade of Boeing’s $52 billion of index-eligible debt would narrowly top the downgrade of Ford’s $51.7 billion in 2020.
No Love Lost: And what of the contract negotiations with the striking machinists that Boeing says are a major contributing factor to its latest slide? They’re not going well. Boeing walked away from the third round of talks on Tuesday: Both sides have accused each other of violating the law by bargaining in bad faith. The company went so far as to make its charge official with a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday.