Unsurprisingly, given the crisis in the aeronautical sector, Airbus has announced the loss of 15,000 jobs worldwide, or 11% of its workforce, of which one third are in France. Airbus does not rule out dry layoffs to deal with the “unprecedented crisis” suffered by the airline industry struck down by the Covid-19.
On the Belgian side, we are not surprised and Bernard Delvaux, the director of Sonaca in Gosselies, subcontractor of Airbus, knows that the coming years will be difficult. His findings are clear: “Today, we are talking about three to five years of slowdown. So, for example, for the leading edges that we have developed and that we manufacture in Gosselies, if Airbus manufactures 60 aircraft per month, we manufacture 60. And if Airbus manufactures 40, we will make 40. So, we are directly linked to the manufacturing volumes. Obviously, we are at a very low point since today we are at 60% of economic unemployment on the Gosselies site. I think there will be another 40% economic unemployment at the end of this year. And, in the context of a gradual rise in volume, we try not to lose skills, whether at the level of engineers or production operators. These are skills that have been trained at length and that make the difference here. In this context, what we are doing in Belgium is essentially making massive use of economic unemployment for as long as possible and as long as it is made available by the federal government. This will be the case until the end of August and, probably, until the end of the year at least. So we will use this method which is best for us to avoid losing skills.”
Maintaining skills within Sonaca therefore seems to be the only way to look to the future in the most serene way in the face of the crisis which promises to be irremediable.
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Sonaca involved in the Orion project, subject of the JT of June 04:
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