Airbus parent EADS came under fire today from shareholders over plans to cut 5,800 jobs, but its chief executive said that ignoring weak defence and space markets would have put even more jobs at risk.
EADS said a three-year reorganisation of its defence and space activities would affect 4,500 jobs on its main payroll.
1,500 of these would be redeployed to commercial planemaker Airbus and helicopter unit Eurocopter.
The company issued figures showing that the largest burden of job reductions would fall in Germany, where 2,000 jobs would be cut compared with 1,260 in France, 557 in Spain and 450 in the UK.
The plan calls for between 1,000 and 1,450 forced layoffs and EADS will not renew 1,300 temporary employment contracts.
The job cuts are the first since EADS negotiated greater independence from governments that collectively control 28% of its capital earlier this year, giving them a veto over national security but no control over industrial issues.
The company's chief executive Tom Enders said that EADS had acted to head off even worse job cuts in the face of shrinking European defence budgets as well as rising competition and weak orders in the space market.
He said he had informed European governments about the proposals, which he compared to the "Power8" restructuring that was credited with bolstering Airbus in 2007.
Compulsory redundancies are relatively rare in France andGermany, where EADS has its main operations, and so far the majority of its 140,000 workers have been shielded by the strength of its fast-growing Airbus commercial business.
The cutbacks coincide with plans to merge the company's defence and space divisions into one unit combining its share of Eurofighter combat jets and Ariane space rockets from January. EADS will also change its name to Airbus next year.
Bernhard Gerwert, head of EADS's defence division and designated chief executive of the new Airbus Defence and Space unit, said more jobs could be cut if the Eurofighter combat jet consortium did not win more orders before 2018.
EADS is looking at ways of reorganising the consortium, which also includes Britain's BAE Systems and Italy's Finmeccanica.
