It appears we should expect more pain in 2024 because companies are not done firing people.

Massive Layoffs
January 10 (King World News) – Gerald Celente:  Last year, U.S. companies planned or carried out layoffs targeting 721,677 jobs, 98 percent more than in 2022 and the most since 2020, outplacement service Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC) said in a report released last week.

Tech companies accounted for 73 percent of the increased terminations. Amazon threw out 27,000 workers. Meta and Microsoft each sloughed off more than 20,000. Other companies from Citigroup to Hasbro to Spotify also trimmed their payrolls.

Retailers held second place, lopping off 78,840 spots, the number soaring 274 percent from 2022. Healthcare and financial services firms placed third and fourth, respectively, in the job-cutting ranks…

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“While there’s a lot of hiring in healthcare, we’ve also seen turnover, more volatility than in most industries,” CGC senior vice-president Andrew Challenger told Yahoo Finance. 

Finance, healthcare, and technology “were areas that spiked” in employment during the COVID War “and had to come back down to Earth,” he added.  

Most of the cuts came during the year’s first half, CGC noted.

“Layoffs have begun to level off and hiring has remained steady as we end 2023,” the report said. However, “labor costs are still high. Employers are still extremely cautious and in cost-cutting mode, so hiring will likely slow and cuts will continue in [this year’s first quarter], though at a slower pace.”

In December, 34 percent of employees gave no holiday bonuses in 2023, up from 27 percent in 2022, a separate GCG survey found.

TREND FORECAST:
Wages will continue to grow but more slowly, bringing their rate of growth closer to the rate of inflation. As a result, real wage gains will not be as robust as they have been during the last half of 2023. 

Layoffs will continue—perhaps less dramatically than the tech industry’s labor bust last year—but steadily.

That loss will increase the chances of the U.S. economy slipping into recession in the first half of this year.

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