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The job losses mount
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The graphic shown further below is from yesterday's USA Today report on the wave of job cut announcements seen over the last few weeks.
Household names such as Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel said Monday that they are laying off a combined 35,000 workers in moves that stressed the severity of the worldwide recession and kicked off what is likely to be a week of gloomy earnings announcements, further job cuts and dismal data.Here's the graphic:
The layoffs continued Tuesday as Corning said it is cutting 3,500 jobs, or 13% of its payroll.
The news ratchets up the pressure on the Obama administration and Congress as lawmakers debate an $825 billion stimulus package intended to save or create millions of jobs. Far more job cuts are likely as consumer and business spending tumbles amid what many economists say is the worst recession the USA has seen since the Great Depression.
Naturally, the bad news is that things will get worse before they get better.
3 comments:
Something is wrong with these figures.
I made a spreadsheet, calculating the total workforce of each company listed before the layoffs. For example, Cigna's total workforce was 27500 since they laid off 1100 which was 4% of their total workforce. Then, I summed the total workforce for each company before the layoffs. This sum came to 1585013.
But the BLS reports only 154447 total people in the labor force as of Dec 2008. See http://www.BLS.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
What is the source of this discrepancy?
If I could post the spreadsheet, I would.
That would be 154447 thousand (154.447 million) people in the workforce. Per the doc you referenced:
Table A. Major indicators of labor market activity, seasonally adjusted
(Numbers in thousands)
So a full 1% of the total workforce just got laid off in the last few days.
Since it is going to get worse, and probably over at least a year if not 3-5, we can expect more people eventually out of work than during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Thank you Al Greenspan.
F you, Al Greenspan.
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