Airbus cost cutting starts with temporary staff

OK so it looks like all the rumours have now come home to roost and Airbus have begun cancelling quarterly contracts.

Now I have to say I don't personally know of anyone who has been laid off or even been told that they are about to be but I guess common sense says money has to be saved somewhere and contractors are traditionally the scapegoats in such circumstances.


Looks like there might be another tin hats leaving do on the cards.



Related topic: Rolls Royce suspends work on Airbus

We have had official confirmation of this this morning but no immediate idea how it will be affecting any of the expats

On a slightly more comic note, the announcement has said that some people may have their hours cut but would not take a cut in salary, contractors have been volunteering for this option in droves !

I know some fitters from the shop floor at Finkenwerder had their contracts terminated last week. The feeling here is that some contracts will not be renewed. Some people have been asked to go to Toulouse along with the design work and I know a few contractors who have accepted the offer and will be down there in a couple of weeks. Quite a few leaving parties coming I guess.

Its not that long ago that Airbus management were moaning that they could not get enough engineers (can take nice swipe at schools & senate for not teaching "appropriatly").

Then its "about turn" and people are being dispensed with. I got impression that the work
hadnt gone away so are Airbus management hoping for some miracle?

I do know a number of people (all local nationality) who work at Airbus...

bit bizarre to call contractors "scapegoats", innit?
IME, contractors (or at least the ones I knew who worked down at EADS) earn oodles and oodles of cash, and have a right cushy number with regular flights home paid for etc etc etc
in return for that they don't get job security
but they knew that when they took the work on, though, right?

Can you point me to where someone pays for my flights home etc etc please ?

well, these were all folk i knew a few years ago
maybe the conditions have changed now, i dunno
they all went back to the uk, one by one

anyroad, yeah - i reckon you should start up a support fund for the poor struggling contractors, dave... i'm sure you'll get monetary contributions flooding in from the pampered permies

Duh, that's exactly why companies hire contractors. Did you miss out on that lesson in Business 101? Contracters are always the first to go, that is the nature of the business and any contractor out there who thinks that can't happen to them should get a reality check.

Yup. They started a big Airbus design center in the USA because they couldn't find the engineers here. Lots of Boeing engineers were enticed to work for Airbus USA with big raises and fat benefits.

I didn't miss the point OR require a reality check, i wasn't moaning or anything else, i was merely making a point that when the shit hits the fan then almost invariably it's the very people they need to put the fire out that are hoofed out first.

I and most all subbies accept the insecurity of the job balanced against the dosh, ferchrissakes that's why most of us do it.

Next time i will wind my neck in and say nowt, the thread was purely for information as it affects a goodly amount of people directly employed by EADS and Airbus and indirectly employed for various suppliers both here in Munich and particularly in Hamburg.

Perhaps if you hadn't used the word scapegoat...

i think UJ just nailed it

hairy muff but i still look at it and can't think of a better word to put in

anyway, my mistake then

I think BD used "scapegoats" as a lot of this is down to poor management and political decisions at senior levels within Airbus. Anyone who loses their job as a result is therefore a "scapegoat", whether permy or contractor, designer or shop floor worker. It's just terminology.

'Scapegoats' says to me, at least, 'someone to blame for the problems'.
What you should have said is that
"money has to be saved somewhere and contractors are traditionally the scapegoats first to be let go in such circumstances."

Yes, that's the most important bit. Getting the semantics right!

Not necessarily. If one of your contractors is brilliant then they can be offered a permanent position whilst moving to oneside a permanent who just goes through the motions.

Keeping contractors can be beneficial if, for instance, none of your permanent staff can be tempted to work in, say Baghdad (taken from a contractors genuine circumstance, not a TT "what if" scenario) then the naturally more mercenary contractor can demand what he wants and pretty much get it.

What really pisses me of on this board is the constant smartarsing that seems to be so much more important than the actual subject of the thread.
You cannot contribute anything to the subject matter? Doesn't matter, go ahead and look for some grammar mistakes, or (uuuuuh, even worse) some paraphrising you can complain about.

Get lost!

Fact is that there's a lot of people who will lose their jobs, Dave as a contractor might be one of them, if not him, then I'm sure he knows quite a ot of people personally which actually will be affected.

As for me, I say thanks Dave, for putting some info in here.
Would appreciate some more, especially insider information that you might not read in the paper or hear in the news, like what Dave wrote about his meeting this morning.

I also cannot help the feeling that some people find quite some joy in the misfortune of the affected contractors...
That's poor.

This is the first time I have ever 'attacked' anyone on this board. I'm just pointing out that some contractors have a 'poor me, I'm being let go because the company wants to cut costs' attitude. I know this attitude, I was a contractor once and I said to myself (back then) 'what's your problem, you are making shitloads of money because you are being paid for the risk you take in being a contractor'. Contractors are not always the 'best of the best' - far from it. I have seen good and bad. There is no security in being a contractor. That's why contractors are hired, so that when there is less money to do projects, and the company needs fewer people to do the projects, the contractors can be let go without a lot of legal repercussions (sp?).

consider also the employees of the contractors. If the contractors are lets say in a bit of a doodle, then you can just imagine where that puts their employees.

I think we're talking about free-lance sub-contractors selling their skills to EADS/Airbus and not to sub-contracted companies who are delivering components to a programme. Different kettle of fish.

The guy/company I worked for previously was a free-lance sub-contractor and then hired me. Dont see mcuh of a difference in the end everybody is in the same kettle.

Good grief...

Some report on the news saying that job losses should be split equally between French and German workers. So it looks like the Brits should be ok

lol I wish that were true but sadly they mean equally between French and German plants

looks like the rats are jumping a perceived sinking ship, lets hope not too many more cancel.

"Fedex has cancelled its order for Airbus aircraft and switched its order to rival Boeing instead.
Fedex Express said it had cancelled its order for 10 Airbus A380-800F superjumbo because of delivery delays"

link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6126206.stm

Airbus order book so far looks like this:

A380 ORDERS SO FAR
Emirates: 43 aircraft
Lufthansa: 15
Qantas: 12
Air France: 10
Singapore Airlines: 10
International Lease Finance: 10
UPS: 10
Thai Airways: 6
Virgin Atlantic: 6
Korean Air Lines: 5
Etihad Airways: 4
Qatar Airways: 2
China Southern Airlines: 5
Kingfisher Airlines: 5
Malaysia Airlines: 6

Not so sure if these figures are still correct.

Read last week that Emirates might be cancelling an order - unconfirmed though.

Anybody got more info?