Layoffs Drop 23.7% U.S. Job Market Holds Strong

U.S. layoff announcements tumbled in October to a three-month low in another sign the job market remains in good shape ahead of next week’s presidential election, a monthly tally of workforce reduction announcements showed on Thursday.

Firms announced 55,597 layoffs last month, down 23.7% from the 72,821 announced in September, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said. 

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Layoffs would have been even lower last month were it not for more than 18,000 aerospace industry job cuts, some 17,000 of which came from Boeing as it copes with an ongoing strike.

Year-to-date announced staff reductions of 664,839 through October are 3.7% higher than through the first 10 months of 2023. That running total is the highest since 2020, the year the COVID pandemic struck, when about 2.16 million layoffs were announced through that year’s first 10 months.

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“Job openings have fallen and hiring is pretty flat at the moment. Companies appear to be in a holding pattern as we await election results and the potential regulatory and market environment that follows,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

While the economy ranks as a top issue among voters, their chief concern has been sticky high prices after a two-year run of inflation rather than a job market that has seen little in the way of layoffs and sports a jobless rate at historically low levels. 

The hangover from high prices has proven to be a thorn in the side of incumbent Democrats — whose presidential nominee is Vice President Kamala Harris — and polls consistently show voters prefer the economic policy proposals from Republican former President Donald Trump. The race is seen as a toss up.

The federal government’s more timely measure of layoffs — weekly figures on the number of new applications for unemployment benefits — was briefly elevated earlier this month due to the impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and ripple effects from the Boeing strike, although they had fallen back by the middle of the month.

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The number of people continuing to draw unemployment checks beyond one week, however, is around a three-year high, though the rise has been gradual in keeping with a job market that economists see as healthy but coming back into better balance. The next update from the Labor Department is due on Thursday.

The Challenger data was released a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly nonfarm payrolls report. According to a Reuters poll of economists, employers are expected to have added 113,000 jobs in October, down from the 254,000 positions created in September thanks again mostly to drags on hiring from the hurricanes and Boeing strike. 

The unemployment rate is forecast to remain unchanged at 4.1%.

(Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Paul Simao)

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