From January through June this year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas has tracked a total of 20,814 announced job cuts by companies headquartered in Ohio, above even the 13,442 announced cuts for all of 2016 in Ohio, the firm said.
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In June 2017 in Ohio, there were 1,831 announced cuts by Ohio-based companies, again well above the 649 announced cuts in June 2016, the company said.
The largest planned cut came from Macy’s which announced 10,000 cuts this year nationally, a Challenger, Gray & Christmas spokeswoman said.
Challenger says it tracks job cuts announced by U.S. employers. It counts cut numbers by corporate headquarters unless the locations of job cuts are specified, said the spokeswoman, Colleen Madden.
Macy’s has corporate offices in Cincinnati and New York.
Some Ohio officials are taking issue with Challenger’s data.
“It doesn’t really mesh with the data we’re seeing,” said Jon Keeling, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Keeling said initial state unemployment claims are on pace to be the lowest on record in Ohio, down 12.8 percent so far this year compared to last year.
He also said Ohio WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) numbers listed just 343 possible job cuts in June 2017.
Nationally, the June job-cut total is 6 percent lower than the 33,092 recorded in May, and 19.3 percent lower than the same month last year when 38,536 cuts were recorded, the first said.
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The new national number shows that the “pace of job cutting is significantly slower compared to the first half of last year,” the report said. Through the first half of 2017, employers announced 227,000 planned job cuts, down 28 percent from the 313,754 cuts announced through the first six months of 2016.
“In a tight labor market, it’s no surprise companies are holding on to their existing workforce. Companies are also waiting on how proposed regulations from the Trump administration may impact business going forward,” John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., said in a statement.
Nationally, job cuts in the second quarter totaled 100,799, down 20 percent from the 126,201 first-quarter cuts and 24 percent lower than the 132,834 job cuts announced in the second quarter of 2016.
“It is typical to see fewer announced job cuts in the summer months. We have not seen large-scale layoffs this year as we did in the last two years, especially in the tech and energy sectors,” Challenger added.
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