Layoff numbers plummet on strong job market

Texas employers laid off close to 6,800 workers so far this year — fewer than half the number sent packing in pre-pandemic 2019, according to notices filed with the Texas Workforce Commission.

The notices are required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a 1988 law requiring companies with 100 or more employees to provide a 60-day warning of closings or mass layoffs. It’s intended to give employees time to find new work or train for new positions.

This year’s single biggest layoff came in August when Michigan-based Home Point Financial Corp. told 526 workers affiliated with its Farmers Branch office they would be terminated beginning Nov. 1. Home Point added 49 more layoffs to the total last month. Mortgage companies have been particularly hard hit this year by a huge drop in demand for home loans caused by higher interest rates.

But a strong labor market in Texas has kept this year’s mass layoffs well below pre-pandemic 2019 and the past two years, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread job losses. In 2019, Texas employers filed WARN notices eliminating 14,553 jobs — more than twice this year’s total with a month left in the year. The pandemic high came in 2020, when WARN notice filings exceeded 91,000 jobs.

WARN notices, however, don’t include all job cuts made by Texas companies.

Coppell-based mortgage lender Mr. Cooper, for example, recently announced a layoff affecting 800 workers in its origination business. Many of the job

cuts were in Chandler, Ariz. Also last month, Dallas-based Builders Firstsource, the largest supplier of materials to homebuilders in the U.S., told investors that it cut 2,600 jobs nationwide in response to this year’s decline in new home construction.

Nationally, employers have announced plans this year to cut 320,173 jobs, a 6 percent increase

over the same 11-month period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The year-to-date total is the second lowest on record, since the firm began tracking job cuts in 1993. The lowest total came in the same period last year.

Job-cutting, however, accelerated in November as U.S. companies eliminated 76,835 jobs — a 127 percent increase from October and a 417 percent spike from the same month last year.

Despite the layoffs, Texas has more people working than ever before after setting monthly employment records for 12 straight months through October.

In the San Antonio-new Braunfels metro area, 6,300 jobs added in September pushed the total to 1.12 million. The gains put the metro’s growth at 53,200 jobs from a year ago.

Yet Texas employers are still clamoring for more help. In September, Texas had nearly 1.03 million job openings, the most

ever and nearly twice the number before the pandemic, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That translates into almost 1.8 openings for every unemployed Texan.

The healthy Texas labor market led one website to describe it as the state where workers are the second-least likely in the nation to lose their jobs.

Hire A Helper said it ranked states based on average monthly discharge rates calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data.