>For the third straight month telecommunication companies led all
>other industries in announced layoffs—14,687, or 17 percent of cuts
>in May—according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a company that
>tracks reports of job cuts. The mass layoffs in the US are part of
>an international trend throughout the slumping telecom industry.
The CGC numbers are widely quoted, but they don't seem to correlate with anything - not the BLS's mass layoffs or general trends in employment and unemployment. They're compiled by clipping newspaper and wire reports of corporate announcements that are at least as much about cheering up stockholders as actual corporate staffing intentions. They also come mainly from large public companies, which employ a small share of the workforce. They do raise worker anxiety, and thereby the subjective unemployment rate, which is something Alan Greenspan likes.
Doug