Oil sector leads in US corporate layoff announcements in April

US corporates announced 65,141 job-cuts in the month of April according to the results of a widely-followed survey.

Last month’s tally represented a 35% jump versus March and was 5.8% above those recorded in the same period one year ago, according to consultancy Challenger, Gray&Christmas.

Nonetheless, “it is not unusual to see heavy job cuts a strong economy. In December 1998, near the height of the dot.com boom, we recorded more than 103,000 planned workforce reductions. The fact is, companies are constantly retooling, and sometimes the best time to do that is when the economy is strong,” Challenger said.

April’s layoffs brought the year-to-date total for 2016 to 250,061 or 24% more than in the comparable period of a year ago and the most for that same stretch of months since 2009, when 695,100 lay-offs were announced.

The energy sector registered the largest increase by far, with 19,759 redundancies announced in April, bringing the year-to-date total to 72,660.

By sectors, computers experienced the next biggest increase in April, with a rise of 17,015.

However, thus far in 2016 the largest increases in job-cut announcements, aside from the Energy sector, were seen in retail (36,977) and then Computer (34,017) and industrial goods (14,756).