And just a few months later, the company laid off hundreds of longtime workers, including her, then aged 59. The layoffs were swift and blunt.
“They walked us out, and wouldn’t let us go back and say goodbye,” said a fellow worker, Debra Hatcher, 57, then a manufacturing operations analyst. “They drove us to an empty parking lot, and that was it.”
Spirit AeroSystems — formed from Boeing’s 2005 sale of its Wichita division and Oklahoma operations — is an important supplier for Boeing, its biggest customer, and a rival, Airbus, chalking up nearly $1.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year.
When it laid off 360 workers in summer 2013, the company was not closing down or moving jobs to Mexico or anywhere else. Spirit, which has 11,000 employees in Wichita and operations in Europe and Asia, said layoffs among its salaried employees and managers were necessary to remain competitive.
Today, a lawsuit filed by 70 former employees, including Ms. Raymond, is in proceedings in the Federal District Court in Wichita. The lawsuit was cleared first by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which must decide the validity of any claim of age or disability discrimination before it can proceed.
The workers brought the suit after discovering that nearly half — or 164 — of those in the 2013 layoffs were 40 or older, the age that initiates federal age discrimination law protections. And workers charge that they were singled out, in addition, because either they or their spouses had serious medical conditions.
