Textron furloughs 7,000 Wichita workers in struggles with coronavirus, economy
Adding to Wichita’s economic woes from the coronavirus threat, Textron Aviation, maker of Cessna, Beechcraft and Hawker airplanes, announced mass furloughs for 7,000 workers Wednesday.
The company is one of the largest employers in the city and state, mostly at its mammoth east Wichita factory.
The furloughs will be mostly U.S-based employees. Each employee’s furlough will last four weeks but the furloughs will be staggered, starting March 23 and going until May 29.
“This allows us to do our part in mitigating and containing the spread of the COVID-19 through social distancing, while continuing to support our customers,” spokesperson Sarah White said in an email.
In a news release, Textron said the company’s effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, which is also called the coronavirus, includes “taking increased action with such measures as limiting large group meetings, increasing daily cleaning of its facilities, restricting travel, and canceling our participation in several global meetings and events.”
The company also said it will be “adjusting production” to meet dropping demand for aircraft.
Machinists District Lodge 70 represents about 4,700 unionized workers at Textron.
Cornell Beard, president and business representative for the union, issued a statement saying that efforts to help furloughed workers is shifting to Washington, D.C.
He said the union will be lobbying Congress “to pass pro-worker legislation supporting working people and their families across this country during this crisis.”
“The Machinists Union is dedicated to protecting the safety, compensation and working conditions of all workers in Kansas,” Beard said in the statement. “This case is no different; we will fight for a just and reasonable response to this pandemic and the consequences it brings.”
Scott Gardner, the union’s communication representative, said he was scheduled to return to the Cessna factory as an assembly installer after his union job was trimmed to part-time due to earlier layoffs that reduced union membership.
“I’m on my way back to the floor Monday,” he said. “So I haven’t been back yet and I probably won’t be for a month at least. So it’s kind of blowing my mind.”
He said his wife’s a teacher who learned along with the rest of Kansas on Tuesday that all school buildings will be shut down for the rest of the school year.
“So that’s all still up in the air,” he said. “We were like, ‘Oh, wow.”
He said to get through the next month, they’ll probably have to dip into a fund he’d saved in case there’s a work stoppage when the contract comes up for renewal negotiations starting in August.
“So I have money saved,” he said.. “Which wouldn’t ordinarily be an issue except for it being a contract year. I would rather not deplete my contract savings.”
It’s the latest in a run of bad news for workers at Wichita’s all-important aircraft plants.
The furloughs follow hundreds of layoffs at the end of last year at Textron, the second-largest company in the city with roughly 9,500 employees, according to the Greater Wichita Partnership.
Those layoffs, mostly engineers and other professionals, were attributed to the completion of design and testing of Cessna’s Citation Longitude business jet. Company officials announced that they were expecting to hire and ramp up production workers.
And those layoffs were in addition to the loss of 2,800 jobs at Wichita’s biggest employer, Spirit AeroSystems, which had to cut production dramatically due to the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jetliner after two deadly crashes overseas.
Spirit makes the 737 Max fuselage and has dozens mothballed on the tarmac at Air Capital Flight Line waiting for Boeing to resume production.
Contributing: Michael Stavola with The Wichita Eagle
This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 12:11 PM.
