Charlotte and Mecklenburg County continue their backward jobs slide on “Jobs Messiah” Mayor Anthony Foxx’s watch. How bad is the pain?
It’s bad.
The Charlotte employment number for the month of August is down by 1,100 over August last year. Imagine that. Some 1,100 fewer people were employed in the Queen City in August 2011 than in August 2010. Employment was down by 2,000 jobs for the county in August over August 2010. That’s going backwards and it continues the downward slide that started in March, when the city and the county began posting smaller jobs numbers than the same month the year before.
And that’s before we find out exactly how much of an ax Bank of America took to its Charlotte workforce in September, because those numbers aren’t out yet for the city and the county. September layoffs were the highest the nation has seen in two years, Reuters reported today, due largely to the activities of two entities, the military and BofA.
The rise in the number of planned layoffs in September was largely from the military and Bank of America.
“It is important to keep in mind that 80,000 cuts, or nearly 70 percent of last month’s total, came from just two organizations: Bank of America and the United States Army,” John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement.
Yes indeed. And the services that BofA planned to target for cuts are largely located here in Charlotte. Have I mentioned recently that BofA is our region’s third largest employer?
