A 20-year record for job cuts

This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Tomorrow is gonna make it two, count them, two monthly jobs reports we ain't never gonna get back. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. I'm Kyra Risdell. It is the November 6. Today, Thursday. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Today being Thursday, the way it works is tomorrow is Friday. It will be the first Friday of the month in point of fact when, in ordinary times, the October jobs report would be forthcoming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Insert here the now overdone observation that these are not ordinary times. But the economy is gonna economy, whatever the politicians are saying and doing. So instead of comprehensive data from the federal government that we have become used to, we're having to make do with private sources. And according to one of those sources, American companies announced more layoffs in the month that just ended than in any October since 2003. 2003 before the pandemic, before even the great recession. The outplacement firm Challenger during Christmas counted more than 153,000 publicly announced job cuts in this economy last month. Marketplace's Henry Epp dug into the details and what they might mean. There were the 14,000 cuts at Amazon, 48,000 at UPS, 1,800 at Target. A common thread in recent layoffs says Andy Challenger whose firm authored the report. Across all these industries and job cuts, it is notable that these are not entry level positions exclusively that are being eliminated. And that's different from other times we've seen layoffs of this magnitude, Challenger says. Usually, they occur during a recession with a certain amount of panic involved. This time It is deliberate. It is for cost efficiencies. In other words, companies wanna save money right now, and an easy way to do that is to pay fewer employees. That's especially true in the tech sector where job cuts have seemed inevitable for a while, says Rucha Venkudre, senior economist at TalentNeuron. Because we still had that huge overhiring period from the pandemic. Right? And I think we're still coming down from that a little bit. Plus, a lot of tech companies are adopting AI tools that can replace workers. But Pavlina Cernova, professor of economics at Bard College, says AI is not to blame for many of the layoffs we're seeing. Instead, the macroeconomic picture is worsening. So now the slowdown in hiring is turning into, more layoffs. So I think, basically, we are slowly moving towards a vicious cycle in the labor market …