(Patriot.Buzz) – Adding a new bad record to his ever-growing list of misfires, more people lost their jobs than any time since early 2023 due to Joe Biden’s economic policies.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, this spells trouble for the job market as we go further into 2024. Just last month companies planned to let go of 82,307 workers. This marks a huge increase of 136% from December but it is still 20% less than January last year.
This figure is the second highest number of job losses for January since 2009. Additionally, companies plan to cut back on hiring people, which also hit the lowest point for January since 2009.
Tech and finance jobs were hit the hardest. Big companies like Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), PayPal, Amazon and UPS said they would slash jobs, signaling the most job cuts in a month since March 2023.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ Senior Vice-President Andrew Challenger said, “Waves of layoff announcements hit US-based companies in January after a quiet fourth quarter.”
He added that the cuts were “driven by broader economic trends and a strategic shift towards increased automation and AI adoption in various sectors, though in most cases, companies point to cost-cutting as the main driver for layoffs.”
In a testament to his words the finance sector fired 23,238 employees, which is the worst loss since September 2018 while tech companies cut 15,806 jobs, the most since May 2023. Food companies said they would layoff 6,656 workers, the highest since November 2012.
Challenger also mentioned that “[h]igh costs and advancing automation technology are reshaping the food production industry. Additionally, climate change and immigration policies are influencing labor dynamics and operational challenges in this sector.”
The firm’s report comes after ADP said that private companies only added 107,000 jobs last month. In turn the Labor Department will share its job numbers soon, and it thinks there will be 185,000 new jobs.
In terms of unemployment 224,000 people applied for benefits last week, showing a 9,000 surge from the week before. In response to this development, the Labor Department admitted that the number of people already getting benefits went up by 70,000.
