"Biggie sizing" the downsizing, or laying off a country's worth of people

By Lee Russ

Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 08:53 AM

Every month, there's a brief flurry of news about mass layoff totals, then everything goes quiet until the next monthly announcement. Few people bother to track them for an entire year, and fewer still bother to add up the cumulative totals for several years.

So I visited the Bureau of Labor Statistics site and plowed through it to come up with the totals for 1996 through November of 2005.  In plain English, the total number of Americans who lost their jobs in mass layoffs during this roughly 10-year period is astounding: almost 18 million.  Enough to make its own decent sized country.

Another tidbit that President Bush can add to his "our economy's great" propaganda campaign.

Total Initial Claimants as a Result of the Mass Layoffs
1996----1,437,628

1997----1,542,543

1998----1,771,069

1999----1,572,399

2000----1,835,592

2001----2,514,862

2002----2,245,051

2003----1,888,926

2004----1,607,158

2005**--1,541,083
_____________
Total, 1995-11/05----17,956,311

**Through Nov. 2005, preliminary data

[And, of course, these mass downsizings did not begin in 1996; they go back well before that.]