Jobs cut pace picks up again

Staff -- Home Textiles Today, 2/6/2002 4:26:00 PM

New York — Ending three straight monthly drops in the pace of job cuts announced by U.S. companies, the pace of layoffs jumped up by almost a third in January, climbing 32 percent above December's level, to a total of 212,704 work force reductions.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement services company that tracks job cuts nationwide, said January's pace of layoffs was the third highest month since Challenger began tracking job cuts in 1993. It marked the fourth time in the past seven months that job cuts exceeded 200,000.

The pace of job cuts last month was 50 percent higher than the 142,208 layoffs announced a year earlier in January 2001. Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 jolted the American economy, the number of announced job cuts is just shy of a million, at a level of 998,699.