Layoff Plans Soar By 126% In September To 115,730, 212% Higher Than Year Ago, Highest Since April 2009

Submitted by Tyler Durden
10/05/2011 07:42 -0400
Comments: 34 / Reads: 6,363

Still bullish on the Friday NFP number? According to Challenger we just went through a "sea-change" event as "Employers announced plans to shed 115,730 workers from their payrolls in September, making it the worst jobcut month in over two years. Heavy reductions planned by the military accounted for a large portion of September job cuts, signaling what may lie ahead as the federal government seeks across-the-board cuts in spending. September job cuts were 126 percent higher than the 51,114 announced in August, according to the latest Challenger report. They were 212 percent higher than September 2010, when employers announced just 37,151 job cuts. Last month’s total is the highest since April 2009, when 132,590 job cuts were announced." Yet this is good news, considering that the biggest source of cuts was the bloated government and the insolvent Bank of America: "One-third of the layoffs announced this year came from government employers. It is, by far, the largest job-cutting sector, with 159,588 announced job cuts to date. This figure includes 54,182 government-sector cuts in September, 50,000 of which are the result of a five-year troop reduction plan announced by the United States Army. The second largest job-cutting sector to date is the financial sector, which announced 54,013 planned layoffs between January 1 and the end of September. That is up 177 percent from the 19,474 job cuts recorded over the first three quarters of 2010. Of the 54,013 financial job cuts this year, 31,167 occurred in September, with 30,000 resulting from Bank of America’s multi-year workforce reduction plan aimed at saving the struggling bank $5 billion per year." That said, while there is no correlation to coincident NFP data, this will be very ugly news down the line.

Some tables:



Cuts by Industry:



And reasons for termination:



And to those who say the military-industrial complex is still in charge:

While the U.S. Army is not a traditional employer, its announcement was very corporate-like in that plans to achieve the reductions “using voluntary and involuntary separations and is considering buyouts, reductions in high-year tenure limits and early retirement boards,â€