JOB CUTS SLOW NATIONALLY, BUT SPEED UP IN OHIO IN JUNE
Employers announced plans to cut payrolls by 31,105 jobs nationally in June, the lowest monthly cuts of the year, according to a report released Thursday by consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
In Ohio, though, the news so far in 2017 isn’t as good.
From January through June this year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas has tracked a total of 20,814 announced Ohio job cuts, well above even the 13,442 announced cuts for all of 2016 in Ohio, the firm said.
In June 2017 in Ohio, there were 1,831 announced cuts, again well above the 649 announced cuts in June 2016, the company said.
The largest planned cut in Ohio came from Macy’s which announced 10,000 cuts this year, a Challenger, Gray & Christmas spokeswoman said. These cuts are not all in Ohio, but are counted for the state because Macy’s is headquartered in Cincinnati.
Nationally, the June job-cut total is 6 percent lower than the 33,092 recorded in May, and 19.3 percent lower than the same month last year when 38,536 cuts were recorded, the first said.
The new national number shows that the “pace of job cutting is significantly slower compared to the first half of last year,” the report said. Through the first half of 2017, employers announced 227,000 planned job cuts, down 28 percent from the 313,754 cuts announced through the first six months of 2016.
“In a tight labor market, it’s no surprise companies are holding on to their existing workforce. Companies are also waiting on how proposed regulations from the Trump administration may impact business going forward,” John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., said in a statement.
Nationally, job cuts in the second quarter totaled 100,799, down 20 percent from the 126,201 first-quarter cuts and 24 percent lower than the 132,834 job cuts announced in the second quarter of 2016.
“It is typical to see fewer announced job cuts in the summer months. We have not seen large-scale layoffs this year as we did in the last two years, especially in the tech and energy sectors,” Challenger added.