Thursday, April 23, 2009

Massive Unemployment: Mass Layoffs March 2009

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the March installment of the Mass Layoff Report clearly showing a dramatic deterioration of the nation’s job market with 2,191 mass layoff events resulting in 228,387 initial unemployment claims causing the six month moving average of non-seasonally adjusted mass layoff events to jump by 80.42% while total initial claimants increased 79.49% on a year-over-year basis.

The BLS considers a mass layoff event to be a condition where there are at least fifty initial claims for unemployment insurance originating from a single employer over a period of five consecutive weeks.