RENTON — About a dozen partially completed 737 MAX airplanes currently inside Boeing’s Renton plant will be finished before production comes to a complete stop in mid-January, the company told employees in an internal email message Monday.
Meanwhile, some Boeing workers will be deployed either locally or as far as Victorville, Calif., to maintain the hundreds of MAX jets idled by the grounding, or to do other work.
Beginning this week, approximately 3,000 workers out of the Renton site’s roughly 12,000 total — those directly involved in manufacturing, engineering and parts fabrication — will be temporarily reassigned, the message states. Some workers at Boeing fabrication plants in Auburn and also in South Carolina will also be affected.
The first wave of reassignment notices went out to employees Monday, informing some workers on the 737 jet program in the Puget Sound region that they will be temporarily transferred to the 767 and 777 programs in Everett.
Other Renton workers will be sent to Moses Lake, where more than 200 completed but undelivered MAXs are currently parked for long-term storage. And some will go to Victorville, Calif., which Boeing has newly designated as another MAX storage site.
