Challenger, Gray & Christmas released their February 2011 layoff report which shows layoffs surged 32% in February to 50,702.

The 50,702 job cuts announced last month was up 32 percent from January’s 38,519. It was 20 percent higher than the 42,090 planned layoffs announced in February 2010. This marks the first year-over-year increase in monthly job cuts since May 2009 when job cuts totaling 111,182 surpassed the 103,522 layoffs announced the same month a year earlier by seven percent.

While Challenger, Gray & Christmas seem to be blaming high gas prices, the details in the layoffs paint a different picture:

The largest portion of layoffs last month came from government and non-profit employers, which announced 16,380 job cuts, up 154 percent from 6,450 in January and 196 percent higher than a year ago when 5,528 job cuts were announced in February. While most of the cuts occurred at the state and local level, the United States Postal Service announced that it reduced its headcount by 5,600 in recent months.

This is your government at work, with a 154% increase in government and non-profit layoffs. Government layoffs are directly attributable to the never ending state budget deficit malaise and the claims one must stiff Federal Workers in order to reduce them (which is false).

Retail sector layoffs increased 44% and we've seen a slowdown in consumer spending, with more money going to gas and food.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracks layoffs. In their May Report (attached), the tally of layoffs is 38,810. April announced layoffs were 38,326. 16,697 of the layoffs were in government and non-profit, which is an increase from last month.

New York had the most firings, with 18,960 layoffs in that state alone in May.

The number one reason for firing people is cost reduction. 15,998 of the 38,810 firings gave this reason.

While Challenger & Gray compares this to last year and seems to say how great it all is, the reality is more corporations have been offshore outsourcing and labor arbitraging American workers for over a decade now. Below is the Challenger Quarterly Layoff tracker starting in 1989. One can see the pattern of treating workers as disposable commodities, starting to escalate as technology, such as cheap telecommunications, expanded and bad trade deals, like the China PNTR came into effect. Global labor arbitrage is a long term structural problem for the U.S. labor force.