Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Planned job cuts announced by U.S. employers totaled 132,590 in April, a 12-percent drop from the 150,411 layoffs recorded the previous month.

This marks the third consecutive decline in monthly job-cut announcements and the lowest total since 112,884 cuts were announced last October, according to the report released Wednesday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

While job cuts have been trending downward, the pace is still well ahead of last year. The April total was 47 percent higher than the 90,015 job cuts announced the same month in 2008. Employers have announced 711,100 job cuts this year, 145 percent more than in the first four months of 2008 (290,671).

One of every seven job cuts this year has come from the automotive sector, which continued to see heavy downsizing in April. The struggling industry announced another 24,172 job cuts during the month, bringing the four-month total to 101,036.

Automotive was surprisingly not the biggest job-cutting sector of the month. The government and non-profit sector saw the highest number of job cuts, with 27,624. These cuts were led by New York City, which announced 13,500 cuts.

“State and local governments, as well as school districts, are really feeling the impact of this downturn. They are losing revenue from property taxes as foreclosure rates increase, as well as from declining sales and income taxes. Meanwhile, their costs are growing as more people find themselves jobless and in need of public assistance,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The recession is also taking a heavy toll on industrial-goods companies, which have announced 78,968 job cuts through the first four months of 2009. That is up 377 percent from a year ago, when job cuts at that point totaled 16,569.

The retail sector has seen an equally large increase in job cuts. The number of planned layoffs has surged 320 percent from 18,933 in the first four months of 2008 to 79,475 job cuts so far this year. Retail ranks second behind the automotive sector for the most job cuts announced this year.

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