Job Market May Be Better Than It Seems

The job market’s recovery has received a mountain of negative press in recent days, but according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., the news may not be all bad.

The Chicago-based placement firm notes that several positive trends point to a strong job market recovery, including a slowdown in the pace of layoffs and an increase in new jobs.

Indeed, layoffs have greatly slowed down since the second half of 2009. “Through the first half of 2009, employers announced 896,675 job cuts. In the second half of 2009, total job cuts dropped 56 percent to 391,355. The number of planned layoffs fell another 24 percent in the first half of 2010, with employers announcing workforce reductions totaling 297,677,” according to the report.

This year payrolls in the U.S. have also begun to make gains. Starting in January of this year, payrolls saw “five consecutive months of net growth and more than one million new jobs added to the economy,” per Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

And while the nation’s unemployment rate is still high at 9.5 percent, it seems to have peaked at 10.1 percent in October of 2009.

“By most accounts, we are barely a year into the recovery. At this point in the previous two recoveries – following the 1991 and 2001 recessions – the job market was actually getting worse. Many people are so caught up looking at the weekly and monthly numbers, that they fail to look at the bigger trends, which indicate just how much the job market has improved over the last 12 months,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in a statement.

Source: Boston Business Journal