The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits jumped to 4.99 million two weeks ago, breaking a record for a fourth straight time, signaling the job market is still deteriorating.
Total benefit rolls surged by 170,000 in the week ended Feb. 7, the Labor Department reported today in Washington. First-time applications for unemployment benefits were unchanged at 627,000 last week, higher than economists projected.
Source: Bloomberg
Hit by expectations of further financial losses, Pioneer Corp. has announced 10,000 job cuts, plant closings in the US and UK, and plans to leave the plasma display market. Job cuts will include 6,000 full-time salaried employees and 4,000 contract workers both in Japan and other countries.
In a move resulting in some 350 job layoffs, the company will shut down two overseas plasma display assembly plants, located in Pomona, California, and Castleford, Britain. Pioneer plans to exit the plasma display business entirely by March of this year, according to wire reports.
Source: betanews.com
As many as 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost this year because of the global economic crisis, says the International Labour Organization(ILO).
The UN agency says that would push up the world’s unemployment rate to 7.1% by the end of 2009, compared with 6.0% in 2008 and 5.7% in 2007.
The ILO’s most optimistic forecast is for 18 million more unemployed, giving a global jobless rate of 6.1%. It says developing countries will suffer most from additional job losses.
Source: BBC News
Another sobering government labor report released Friday showed the economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, bringing 2008’s total job loss to just below 2.6 million.
Last year’s steep drop in employment marked the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945, the year in which World War II ended.
According to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, the unemployment rate rose to 7.2% last month from 6.7% in November and higher than economists’ forecasts of 7%.
Source: CNN Money
job losses chart
According to CNNMoney: “Hyundai Motor America is taking aim at Americans’ worries about job security: If you buy a new Hyundai and lose your job within a year, you can give it back.”
“With no extra charge to the sticker price, the program pays the difference between the car’s trade-in value at the time the owner files a claim and any remaining balance on the loan up to a maximum of $7,500.”
According to AP: “Staring at 533,000 lost jobs, economists were anything but hopeful. Since the start of the recession last December, the economy has shed 1.9 million jobs, and the number of unemployed people has increased by 2.7 million — to 10.3 million now out of work.
Some analysts predict 3 million more jobs will be lost between now and the spring of 2010 — and that the once-humming U.S. economy could stagger backward at a shocking 6 percent rate for the current three-month quarter.”
According to San Francisco Business Times: “With the pace of Bay Area layoffs increasing, particularly in the East Bay, workforce retraining efforts are also gathering steam.
Large-scale job cuts have accelerated with the closure of department store chain Mervyns’ Hayward corporate office and eight East Bay locations, and the acquisition of Longs Drug Stores Corp. by CVS Caremark Corp., with the loss of 800 Longs corporate jobs. This week, electronics retailer Circuit City Inc. said it would close 155 stores nationally, including six in the East Bay.
These are among the region’s biggest layoffs since last year, when job losses were focused on the home lending industry. Roy Bertuccelli, a program financial specialist at the Alameda County Workforce Investment Board in Hayward, said the last three weeks have been “extremely unusual. … All sectors of the economy are slowing down.”
Meanwhile, green industries, health care and biotech continue to hire. Bertuccelli is seeking to retrain workers to match up with continued demand from “sunrise” industries.”
According to NYTimes: “Sezmi, the company with a bold plan to reinvent television for the Internet age, laid off 20 percent of its staff today, or around 20 employees, in what its president and chairman Phil Wiser described as an acknowledgment of tough economic times.
Once a secretive start-up called Building B, Sezmi is aiming to build a comprehensive television service it can provide to mid-tier telephone companies that need to offer their customers a television option. The company has built a set-top box with an integrated DVR and a unique interface that combines Internet channels with regular programming. It has also designed a hybrid distribution network that involves sending high-definition television over spectrum it licenses from local television broadcasters.”
According to CNNMoney: “As the faltering economy forces companies to cut back, employee perks are among the first things to go. And along with free coffee in the break room, the next thing your employer might axe is its contribution to your retirement savings plan.
About 84% of companies in the U.S. offered employees a 401(k) match as of last year according to Watson Wyatt, a benefits consulting firm.”
According to San Jose Mercury News: “The number of people looking for work in Silicon Valley was up sharply in October, sending the unemployment rate to 6.9 percent — still far below California’s jobless rate of 8.2 percent.“
According to The Daily News: “The University of Texas Medical Branch campus, where a chorus of ambulance sirens once was constant and thousands of workers conducted the daily business of keeping a 550-bed hospital running, was somber and quiet Tuesday as the first of 3,000 people learned they no longer had jobs.
Most had worked at John Sealy Hospital, where workers will take the brunt of the massive cut.
Many had never worked any place except the medical branch.
Some who had held out hope their jobs would be spared sat in disbelief at the news. Others, minutes after being dismissed, attended classes to brush up their job-seeking skills.
Then, there were those who didn’t yet know. They waited in dread to enter rooms where their supervisors would deliver the news.
The University of Texas System regents last week authorized cutting up to 3,800 full-time equivalent positions after Hurricane Ike devastated the island campus that had employed 8,000 people.”
According to ITExaminer: “AMD’s Indian employees can rest easy, as the company has no plans to follow up layoffs in the US with similar cuts in India.
AMD India managing director, Dasaradha Gude. said, “This is a global impact of economic slowdown, and AMD hopes to come back hard. It will affect India as well, but we are also at the hiring spree.” He added, “There are no such plans to have similar lay-offs in India.”
According to Reuters: “The governor of a Chinese province sat down with protesters after they fought pitched battles with police, a rare concession by a leader and a sign of government concerns about stability as the economy slows.
Xu Shousheng held a meeting with 10 representatives in Wudu in the poverty-stricken northwestern province of Gansu two days after the riot in which dozens were injured, state media said.”
Riots in China
Photo: Reuters
According to AP: “Citing the weak global economy and reduced demand, International Paper Co. has closed its pulp mill in northeastern Louisiana, terminating 550 employees.”
Fortune: “I was thinking about the financial mess the other day and I came up with this theory. I’m wary of it because it’s comforting, even uplifting, and by definition any economic supposition that has a happy ending is suspect. So with that caveat here goes:
I remember talking to a wise man at the end of the last decade who was pointing out to me how much the market had gone up during the 1990s and how stocks couldn’t possibly continue to go up at that rate. The market’s historical annual mean gain is about 8%, and yet between 1990 and 2000 the market had climbed some 15% per annum.” (full story)
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