“A difficult context”: Airbus will cut up to 2,500 jobs in its defense and space branch

The European aerospace industry is in bad shape. On Wednesday October 16, Airbus announced its intention to cut up to 2,500 positions in its satellite producing branch. Citing in a press release the need to adapt to “a difficult context for the activity”the European industrial giant explained that it wanted “rationalize your organization to improve competitiveness in the future”.

“These measures should result in a reduction of up to 2,500 positions by mid-2026” within the division “Defense and Space” (D&S) which currently has some 35,000 employees, indicated the same source.

We suspected something like this was going to happen.

Hervé Pinard, Airbus CFDT coordinator

If the terms of these workforce reductions were not immediately specified, Airbus said it wanted to avoid “restrictive measures” and promised to work to “limiter l’impact” social of this decision. “Given the rather catastrophic financial results we had, we suspected that something like this was going to happen”declared Hervé Pinard, CFDT coordinator for the entire group.

The deputy coordinator of FO D&S, Jean-Daniel Bloquet, warned that “reduction of workforce cannot be the main adjustment variable” and considered possible “that there will be austerity measures announced in the medium term if we do not resolve the problem with the soft solutions that have been proposed to date.”

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According to the CFE-CGC D&S central union delegate, Thierry Préfol, Airbus will give details on the distribution of measures by country and activity on December 4. A wait at “anxious side” for employees, he regretted, emphasizing the importance of “until” 2500 deletions. “It cannot increase but (…) it can decrease“, he clarified.