Boeing employees' job status outlined

Tulsa Boeing workers learned their fate Tuesday, as Canadian-based Onex decides who to keep and who to fire. <br/><br/>Onex is in the process of buying the Boeing plants in McAlester, Wichita, and Tulsa.

Monday, May 23rd 2005, 12:25 pm

By: News On 6

Tulsa Boeing workers learned their fate Tuesday, as Canadian-based Onex decides who to keep and who to fire.

Onex is in the process of buying the Boeing plants in McAlester, Wichita, and Tulsa. Letters went out to workers Tuesday. News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg says the workers that kept their jobs got their letters through the regular mail; the ones that lost their jobs got the letter from a courier.

The News on 6 talked with one man who got some bad news. Mark has worked at Boeing for 21 years, the letter got to his house before he did. "My wife called, and she told me all what was going on and it seems to me it's kind of a raw deal how they went about doing it, but they gotta figure some way to do it.â€ He has to figure out a way to keep providing for his family. "It's an emotional time right now, kids getting out of high school and junior high."

He and the other fired workers will keep getting full pay and benefits from Boeing until the deal with Onex goes through. If for some reason the deal "doesn't" go through, Boeing says there are no plans to re-hire the workers. "Yeah, it's scary. The only thing I can think of is, thank God I learned the skills that you need to basically feed yourself."

Onex is asking workers here and in Kansas for a 10-percent pay cut. Mark says he would have taken it, if he'd had the chance. "Y'know, it's been a good place, or I wouldn't have stayed out here so long." Now come the what if's and the what now's. "I've got a lot of friends outside of Oklahoma who say come to Dallas, you'll make more money, come to Kansas City, you'll make more money, and I've stuck to Tulsa all this time."

Onex isn't saying how many Boeing workers they were keeping. They only say the vast majority, but they wouldn't give an exact number.