Job cuts are on the rise, approaching levels not seen since the earliest days of the COVID pandemic.
A new report released by Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows 270,400 jobs have been cut since the beginning of 2023.
That’s a 396% increase over first-quarter 2022.
The month of March was particularly brutal on employees with 89,700 layoffs, a 15% month-to-month rise over February and a 319% increase year-to-year over March 2022.
Big tech has been the most notorious culprit, responsible for 38% of all 2023 layoffs, according to the report. The spree of layoffs at tech goliaths like Amazon, Google and Meta began late last year, and each company has already laid off over 10,000 employees since.
In fact, the tech sector is on pace to eliminate employees at a clip that could surpass even the darkest days of the dot-com bust in 2001, when 168,400 jobs were lost over the course of the year.
Financial companies are a distant second behind tech jobs, making up 11% of all layoffs.
Additionally, the Labor Department revised last week’s jobless claims total up to 48,000 after changing their methods of data analysis, and the Federal Reserve is still trying to rein in the inflation rise.
“A rising trend in claims has been a key missing part of the labor market story, but it is now clear layoffs are increasing,” Pantheon Macro chief economist Ian Shepherdson said in a statement, according to Forbes. “These data alone won’t stop the Fed from raising rates again in May, but they are a warning sign that should not be ignored.”
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