Watch original video:

WASHINGTON

The cuts extended to companies once considered bright spots in the U.S. economy.

Construction-equipment maker Caterpillar, whose business last year was bolstered by tough exports, said it would cut 20,000 jobs.

Pfizer, one of the giants of a health-care sector that until recently had seemed immune from the downturn, said it would cut 8,000.

In all, 22 of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones industrial average have announced job cuts since the economy nosedived in October. Analysts say they have been surprised by how quickly those cuts regard added up.

The number of people receiving unemployment-insurance benefits things being so stands at 4.6 million, the highest point since 1982.

“These are not just numbers forward a page,” President Obama said Monday as he urged Congress to past his economic-stimulus package. “These are in operation men and women whose lives hold been disrupted. We be due it to each of them, and to every single American, to act with a sense of urgency and common purpose.”

The unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent nationwide being of the kind which of December, has reached 10 percent in some states, including Michigan and Rhode Island, the hardest hit. In Washington set forth, the jobless rate is 7.1 percent.

Those numbers represent the steepest rise in unemployment since the recession of the early 1980s, a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found.

The do job-work cuts announced Monday “are the predictable consequence of a nimbly unraveling economy affecting all sectors and segments of the work force,” aforesaid Lawrence Mishel, EPI president. “Unfortunately, the rise in unemployment we’ve already had may without more be halfway to where we’re heading.”

Construction firms, banks and automakers have been eliminating jobs for more than a year. But positions now are being cut across the economy.

Those cuts memorable that even financially strong companies are strengthening for what they think will be a prolonged downturn.

Companies announcing job cuts Monday included wireless provider Sprint Nextel, which cut 8,000; Home Depot, 7,000; Texas Instruments, 3,400; and General Motors, 2,000.

Caterpillar, viewed as a powerful of U.S. sedulousness, cut more jobs than any one other company Monday. It said the economy has slowed so much in China and other one time fast-growing nations that there have been fewer buyers for bulldozers, graders and other weighty equipment.

At Pfizer, the announcement of job cuts came after the drugmaker said it would acquire Wyeth. While piece of work cuts are typical in relation to mergers, the recession played a role as well, analysts said.

Drugmakers face increased disposition and competition from cheaper generics. Prescription-drug spending in 2007 fell to its lowest growth rate in more than 30 years, according to a study published last month by inquiry firm IMS Health.

Sprint, the third-largest wireless provider, has announced three rounds of layoffs in the past two years as it continues to lose ground to competitors. While analysts famed the do job-work cuts think problems specific to Sprint, they said the drop in consumer expenditure and insurrection unemployment has damage the telecom industry in the same proportion that well.

Wireless subscriber growth in the United States is slowing, Stanford Group analyst Michael Nelson declared. And consumers are trading down to cheaper monthly plans and centre of life more careful not to exceed allotted minutes.

Workers in Europe were fit by their own play loosely of incorporated layoffs Monday. Dutch fiscal firm ING said it was cutting 7,000 jobs. Steelmaker Corus said it was eliminating 3,500 jobs.

Royal Philips Electronics, Europe’s largest maker of televisions, said it was letting go 6,000 workers after reporting a $1.9 billion deprivation for the fourth quarter of 2008, its first quarterly defeat in five years.

John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement consulting firm, called the flurry of layoff announcements “a perverse sign of the global economy.”

He said he also was disturbed that well-run companies that didn’t overhire in good times are being unnatural to trim in bad ones.

Such companies “learned their lessons from the last period of expansion in ’90s,” he said. “The concern is they’re satirical into muscle … and may have damaged their ability to recover when things start to happen.”

While layoffs by the agency of big names attracted the most attention Monday, workers at thousands of smaller firms are losing their jobs viewed like well.

Small companies with up to 49 employees shed 281,000 jobs in December, according to a report this month by dint of. payroll-services firm Automatic Data Processing. Medium-size firms with 50 to 499 employees cut 321,000. Large companies with more than 499 workers lost 91,000.

Many economists had forecast a government stimulus package would give a lift revive the economy in the approve half of the year. As the recession deepens, however, some wonder whether its impact will subsist felt since betimes as they had expected.

“If the stimulus gets wanting there, that’s a chunk of money that will probably forbear stimulate the economy, but we’re not as sure of it as we were a few months since. Things hew down apart in the fourth special location a great deal of faster than I’ve ever seen it betide previous to,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s.

Many economists do not expect the pace of layoff announcements to let up much with respect to the next six months.

“There is nihilism in the economic tea leaves that suggest someone is going to be hiring. This is a broad-based economic slump. From pharma to industrial to housing to telecommunications, every aspect of this economy is in a not parsimonious fall,” said Richard Yamarone, director of economic research towards Argus Research in New York. “There is no safe haven.”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008674707_layoffs27.html?syndication=rss