While the pace of U.S. job creation continues to disappoint, job security appears to be stronger than ever, according to employment expert Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Its latest report on downsizing activity reveals that planned job cuts announced by employers in August fell to 34,768, the lowest monthly total in over a decade, the Chicago outplacement firm said.
Meanwhile, another employment authority, Robert Half International, says its latest survey indicates hiring activity is expected to pick up in the final months of 2010. A net 6 percent of executives expect to hire, an increase of 3 points over the previous quarter.
In the Challenger Gray survey, August job cuts were down 17 percent from the 41,676 cuts announced in July.
This marks the first decline following three consecutive months of increases, the firm said. August not only replaces April as the lowest job-cut month of the year, it represents the lowest job-cut month since June 2000, when employers announced only 17,241 planned layoffs.
Job cuts last month were 55 percent below the 76,456 planned cuts announced in August 2009. So far in 2010, monthly totals are, on average, 62 percent lower than the year-ago figure. Overall, the 374,121 job cuts through August are down 65 percent from the 1,070,504 layoffs announced by this point in 2009.
There have been 15 consecutive months in which job cuts have not exceeded 100,000, said CEO John A. Challenger. Job cuts have not exceeded 50,000 since March.
“To put this in perspective, job cuts never fell to these levels following the 2001 recession; not even when the economy was reaping the rewards of the housing boom,” he said. “You have to go all the way back to the expansion of the late 1990s and early 2000 to find a similar pace of downsizing,” Â
“In many respects, we are coming out of this recession faster than in the previous recession, which saw a jobless recovery period that lasted nearly two years,” Challenger said. “In contrast, payrolls turned positive and unemployment began falling just six months into this recovery, which some economists estimate began in July 2009. This progress, however, is overshadowed by the fact that the recovery was starting from a hole that was much deeper than any other recent recession. We obviously have a long way to go before this job market looks and feels like a recovery.”
