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Coming on the heels of a gloomy stretch of employment statistics, TheStandard.com's Layoff Tracker now shows that Internet-related firms have announced more than 100,000 job cuts since December 1999.

While not exactly cause for celebration, the milestone offers a chance to look back at how this figure got so big so fast.

3Com pushed the tracker over the 100,000 mark with Monday's announcement that 3,000 of its employees will be cut because of "turmoil in the telecommunications industry." The network equipment maker is only one of 727 firms that have cut their staffs to date. The layoffs have occurred across the Net sector, with tech companies and online consulting firms being the hardest hit.

The Layoff Tracker reached the 50,000 halfway mark on Feb. 2. Some of the larger announcements of job cuts that helped it inch over the 50-yard line came from Lernout & Hauspie, Nortel Networks, iXL and MarchFirst.

The Layoff Tracker includes confirmed reports of staff reductions affecting 10 or more workers at Internet-related companies or from the Internet divisions of offline firms.

TheStandard.com's figures are somewhat conservative compared with those reported by other researchers. The totals do not include staff cuts made at all technology and telecom firms. For example, Dell Computer's announcement on Monday of 3,000 to 4,000 job cuts is not included in the tracker's total. Other researchers, such as Challenger, Gray and Christmas, count Net layoffs in the 572,000 range.

Large-scale layoffs that occur as a result of a company closure are included. To date, TheStandard.com's Flop Tracker has tallied 181 Net firms that have closed up shop. Interestingly, half of all companies reporting three or more rounds of layoffs have ended up shutting down.

The 100,000 layoff milestone is only the most recent in a string of reports that point to a worsening national employment picture. On Tuesday, the Labor Department (news - web sites) reported a 0.1 percent drop in productivity for nonfarm business -- the first drop in six years.

Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that nationwide unemployment has hit 4.5 percent, the highest jobless rate since 1998. On Thursday, a report showed that unemployment insurance claims have topped 870,000 since October 2000.

Just a couple days prior, the Economic Cycle Research Institute released a report depicting an equally gloomy future. The ECRI's Leading Employment Index, which predicts the health of the nation's job market 12 months out, has registered declines across several economic sectors for the past three months.

History has shown that when the index drops across several sectors, a recession might be near.

In fact, the National Association of Purchasing Manufacturers also reported a dip in its services sector employment index. Some 80 percent of all U.S. jobs are in service industries. The NAPM's data show that within a wide range of companies in the services sector, a higher percentage are reporting that employment is staying the same or shrinking. By extension, fewer companies are reporting an increase in employment.

Economists agree that decreased consumer spending will be the straw that breaks the U.S. economy's back. Because consumer confidence and purchase patterns are heavily influenced by the job market, further deterioration of employment figures might seal the deal on a U.S. recession.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), May 09, 2001

Answers

Good article. But, all of this should be perfectly obvious by now.

-- Wellesley (wellesley@freeport.net), May 09, 2001.

That's what I like about Grassroots; you always get tomorrow's news here first. I think the coming downturn is obvious to all of us, because we've seen the trend-setting stories here, ahead of time.

-- Nancy7 (nancy7@hotmail.com), May 09, 2001.