Report indicates Boston jobs may be up year over year

Posted on August 31, 2011

Employers have been cutting jobs the past three months, but all in all Boston jobs may be up year over year, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray, and & Christmas, the outplacement firm.

United States-based employers announced plans to trim 51,114 workers from the payrolls in August, a 23-
percent decline from July, when the number of job cuts hit a 16-month high of 66,414.

The August decline follows three consecutive increases in the monthly job-cut total that saw job cuts rise from 36,490 in April to the July peak. The August total, however, was up 47 percent from a year ago, when employers announced just 34,768 job cuts during the month.

Employers have now announced 363,334 planned layoffs so far this year. That is only 2.9 percent below a 2010 eight-month job-cut total of 374,121. The gap between 2010 and 2011 year-to-date job cuts has steadily fallen over the last few months. In March, year-to-date job cuts were 28 percent behind 2010. By June, the difference dropped to 17 percent. Now, less than three percent separates 2011 and 2010.

“July job cuts spiked as a result of a handful of surprisingly large jobcut announcements in the private sector. It is too soon to tell whether those cuts were an anomoly, but they appeared to be driven by industry- and company-specific trends, as opposed to larger economic ones. In August, the private sector once again took a backseat to the government sector, which saw job cuts surge to the second highest monthly total this year,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.