Sept. 3: John Challenger of employment consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas discusses the latest U.S. layoffs report.
CNBC
Worst summer for layoffs since 2002
Reductions rose 12 percent in August from a year earlier
AP, CHICAGO - Job cuts announced by U.S. employers last month jumped 12 percent over a year ago to cap the busiest summer of downsizing in six years, according to a report released Wednesday.
The monthly job reductions slowed somewhat from July but still exceeded the year-ago figure for a seventh time in 2008, according to the report by job placement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Employers announced plans to reduce their work forces by 88,736 jobs in August — 14 percent fewer than the 103,312 job cuts announced in July but 12 percent more than the 79,459 recorded in August 2007.
For the summer period of May through August, job cuts totaled 377,325, up from 249,197 in the summer of 2007.
The latest tally pushes the total of announced cuts in 2008 to 667,996, up 29 percent from 515,855 in the first eight months of 2007.
The firm said that at the current pace, job cuts will surpass last year's 12-month total by the middle of October and could exceed 1 million for the first time since 2005.
"Hopes of a late-summer reprieve in layoffs were dashed by heavy downsizing in the automotive and government sectors, where employers announced 17,233 and 12,328 job cuts, respectively," said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The report defines the summer period as May through August.
The four-month stretch that began this week is typically the heaviest job-cutting period of the year, as employers scramble to meet annual earnings goals and make staffing adjustments based on the coming year's budget, Challenger said. No letup in job cuts is expected.
One bright spot in the latest report was that job cuts in the financial sector fell to their lowest monthly level since July 2007. Financial companies announced 2,182 job cuts in August, down sharply from the average 14,396 job cuts over each of the previous seven months.
The financial sector remains the largest job-cutting industry for the year, with 102,957 announced cuts, ahead of 80,323 by the automotive sector.
Phil Gramm Is Conservatism: The Sequel
By Bill Scher
September 2nd, 2008 - 3:45pm ET
When Phil Gramm called America a "nation of whiners" for not loving the economy, I said: "This is does not make Gramm uniquely callous. It just makes him a conservative." Gramm was merely echoing documented and widespread sentiment among conservative leaders -- that if you feel the economy isn't working for you, then you're wrong.
Today in St. Paul, where conservatives are gathered for the Republican National Convention, Gramm wanted to make sure you heard him right. Bloomberg (via ThinkProgress) reports:
"If you're sitting here today, you're not economically illiterate and you're not a whiner, so I'm not worried about who you're going to vote for,'' Gramm told supporters of McCain at a Financial Services Roundtable event in Minneapolis on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.
Putting the politics of the presidential campaign aside, exactly who was Gramm talking to at a "Financial Services Roundtable event?"
As The Financial Services Roundtable describes itself:
The Financial Services Roundtable represents 100 of the largest integrated financial services companies providing banking, insurance, and investment products and services to the American consumer. Member companies participate through the Chief Executive Officer and other senior executives nominated by the CEO.
Literally, the CEOs of the nation's top financial services companies and their representatives.
So to translate Gramm-speak, if you are a CEO of corporations such as Allstate, Bank of America, Capital One, Charles Schwab, Citigroup, Countrywide, Fidelity Investments, General Electric, JPMorganChase, Visa, Wachovia or another of the top 100 financial services companies, then you are "not economically illiterate and you're not a whiner."
Never mind that several of those "economically literate" CEOs are directly responsible for the current housing and credit crisis.
But Gramm is at least right that these CEOs are not whining. Why would they? They are doing quite well, after taking advantage of conservative economic policies to line their pockets while the American economy turns to rubble.
As for those in the 99.999999% of the country -- who are not part of the Financial Services Roundtable and who are trapped under the economic rubble -- Phil Gramm still speaks for conservatism when he tells you to shut up.
While Gramm is speaking for conservatives, we at Campaign for America's Future are speaking to conservatives. Check out our new ad below, which is greeting conservative delegates in their St. Paul hotel rooms this week.
And if Phil Gramm wants to call us whiners for reminding them about the damage inflicted on Americans by their policies, then we'll just whine louder.
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