This is almost an 80% rise from the same period the previous year.
A recent report which was released by global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas revealed that employers have announced 696,309 job cuts through May, marking an increase of 80% from the 385,859 announced in the first five months of last year.
This is interesting as the numbers are 65,049 cuts away from matching the entire year’s total for 2024.
Earlier, the US-based employers announced 93,816 job cuts during May.
This is down 12% from 105,441 cuts in April, and up 47% from 63,816 announced in the same month last year.
Why Would This Happen?
The main reasons behind company layoffs include consumer spending, funding cuts, tariffs, and general economic gloom, according to Andrew Challenger, Senior Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Now the businesses are cutting back on expenditure, delaying recruiting, and issuing layoff letters owing to the extreme strain these circumstances are placing on their workforces.
Notably, technology remains to be a leading sector for these job cuts as it faces mounting and rapidly changing disruptions.
While that being said, technology firms such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, are expected to let off more than 1 lakh employees by 2025.
In the case of Microsoft, the company plans to cut thousands of jobs, mainly in sales, as it streamlines its workforce amid increased AI investments.
It appears that AI has emerged as a big disruptor of tech employment as technology firms have been increasingly announcing job layoffs to make way for AI expertise and investments.
After technology, retail is the second-leading industry in job cuts this year, behind the Government.
So far, retailers with 11,483 jobs cut further plans for a total of 75,802.
This is going to be a 274% increase from the 20,276 Retail job cuts announced in the first five months of 2024.
The foreign-born workers saw a slightly higher rate of unemployment than their native-born counterparts during 2024.
The results would further skew as the Trump administration’s immigration policies of 2025 are in favour of native-born American workers as job layoffs across the board increase.
Source – https://trak.in/stories/7-lakh-us-employees-fired-in-just-150-days-layoffs-surge-80/