Businesses may not have begun their hiring sprees yet, but theyve cut back on the layoffs.
A seasonally adjusted 153,127 workers were let go in 1,726 mass layoff events in December, the Labor Department said Wednesday. A mass layoff is an incident in which a single employer terminates 50 or more workers.
Employers laid off 10,696 fewer workers in December than the previous month, resulting in the smallest number of mass layoffs and people laid off as a result since July 2008.
Of the major industries the Labor Department tracks, manufacturing accounted for the largest number of workers terminated in mass layoffs last month: 64,540. But the sector has been making up a smaller share of mass layoffs. Manufacturing was responsible for 30% of the people let go in mass layoffs in December, down from 49% a year earlier.
As the budget pain in states and cities has become more acute, sub-industries, such as food service contractors; highway, street, and bridge construction and school and employee bus transportation shed the most workers in mass layoffs of any sub-industries last month. The number of workers cut in mass layoffs in the food service contractors industry was 14.9% higher than the same time last year. For the road construction group it was 6.6% higher.
Some of the spike may have been influenced by seasonal variations. For example, layoffs appeared high among school and employee bus transportation workers last month, but the number of people let go was actually down 5.7% from the same time last year. With many schools taking breaks in December, can be a peak time for layoffs in industries such as busing.
The number of workers laid off in the three leading subgroups combined is still lower than the number let go by manufacturers.
Since the recession began in December 2007, there have been 51,978 mass layoff events, seasonally adjusted, resulting in companies letting go of more than 5.2 million workers.
Last year set a new record high for the number of mass layoff events, 28,030, and the workers shed as a result, more than 2.8 million, since the Labor Department began tracking the annual data in 1996.