> Chief Executive Officer Alain Bellemare said he did not expect the job cuts, which include 1,500 workers in Quebec and 500 in the rest of Canada, would affect the company's talks with the federal government over a $1 billion investment in its CSeries jet program.<p>"Hey Federal Government, we'd like you to help us out to the tune of a billion dollars, because we're such a big important employer here in Canada... also, we're going to slowly stop being such a big employer"
In 2014, while in college, I did a co-op rotation at the Bombardier Transportation facility in Pittsburgh, PA. The rail division may be based in Germany, but there's a sizable rail engineering contingent in Pittsburgh. I worked with a lot of good people and engineers there--I hope they do alright. Even in 2014 there was grumbling by the engineers about upper management, and I remember attending an "all-hands" meeting where a visiting executive talked of belt-tightening. In a fairly tone-deaf delivery, he spoke of limiting his own business-class international travel.
There are hundreds of millions of people in North America. Why do people act like gaining or losing a couple thousand jobs is some kind of earth-shaking development?
I get that losing jobs sucks for the people involved, but sometimes I even see US jobs reports delivered as breaking news in national newspapers. Why?
There is a lot of value and scale at Bombardier. What is likely to happen is some private equity firm will form a syndicate and purchase the company - cut it into pieces, slash management, remove the fat etc. It will be a 3-5 year process.<p>Worth highlighting I am not saying this with disdain for the private equity industry. One of its intanigble benefits is that it serves as an agent of dramatic change for companies and industries - change that cannot spontaneously occur for public or government owned institutions (e.g. the post office). Will be interesting to see how this plays out long term...
Bombardier is a weird company. It's one of those huge conglomerations that is in multiple lines of business, like some of the Japanese consortiums. This article mentions their aerospace and rail lines, which I wasn't even aware of; their more visible business, as far as I know, is in ATVs, snowmobiles, and jetskis.
I initially thought that the number of bombardier jobs (as in, the guy who drops bombs from a plane) was being reduced by 7500. I was shocked there were that many.
And in a few years expect to read "Bombardier to Cut 7,500 Additional Jobs Through 2023." Such is life in a demand-limited economy, where the more companies cut jobs and pay, the more their profitability and the larger economy suffers, and the more they further cut jobs.
Bombardier should probably be split up into multiple smaller companies and taken off the public's $$$. I've paid taxes and I'm pretty sure most of my tax dollars are just getting thrown at Bombardier.