-- US job cuts increased in April to the third-highest total for the month since 2009 as technology companies continued to announce layoffs amid a shift toward artificial intelligence, Challenger Gray & Christmas said Thursday.
Employers in the US announced 83,387 layoffs last month, up 38% from March, but down 21% year over year, according to the outplacement and executive coaching firm. The consensus was 70,000 job cuts in a Bloomberg-compiled survey.
The technology sector led the workforce reductions for April, with 33,361 cuts, reflecting an annual increase of 33%.
"Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements," Andy Challenger, the firm's chief revenue officer, said in a statement. "They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is."
Meta Platforms (META) announced plans to let 8,000 employees go and cancel 6,000 open roles in April, while Snap (SNAP) said it will lay off about 1,000 employees.
So far this year, about 16% of total job cuts have been attributed to AI, up from 13% through March, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas.
Employers announced a total of 300,749 job cuts for the first four months of the year, about half of those recorded in the same period last year, the firm said.
The report comes a day before the April nonfarm payrolls report.
Official data is expected to show Friday that the US economy added 65,000 nonfarm jobs in April, compared with a 178,000 increase reported for the previous month, according to a Bloomberg-compiled consensus. On Wednesday, ADP (ADP) said that employment in the US private sector grew at its fastest pace in more than a year.
Separately, the seasonally adjusted number of initial jobless claims increased to 200,000 for the week ended May 2 from the previous week's upwardly revised level of 190,000, the Department of Labor reported Thursday. The consensus was for a 205,000 reading.
For the week ended April 25, continuing claims fell by 10,000 to about 1.77 million, below Wall Street's estimate of 1.8 million.
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