Fired for Now: Getting fired, laid off, and hired again

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December’s just-announced unemployment stats were so predictable that another month of whopping job loss across North America hardly raises an eyebrow.

However, buried in the Associated Press story today I came across a stat that really did surprise me.

In reporting the various industries that slashed jobs in December, leisure and hospitality were at the bottom of the list. Seriously?

Here are the U.S. stats for December’s job cuts by those industries that did major damage:

Construction companies: 101,000 jobs cut
Factories: 149,000 jobs cut
Professional & business services: 113,000 jobs cut
Retailers: 67,000 jobs cut
Leisure & hospitality: 22,000 jobs cut

Now, 22,000 lost jobs isn’t trivial but consider for a moment that you were given a list of these five industries and then asked to rank them according to the number of recent job cuts.

Maybe my intuitive radar is broke, but I would never have placed money on leisure and hospitality coming out the winner on this list.

My assumption has been that that hotel stays, resort vacations, theatre and concert tickets and meals out would become top casualties for anyone watching their disposable income (or lack of). That goes for personal and business budgets.

But these numbers tell a different story. After my initial surprise, I thought, okay, maybe this is a percentage story. Perhaps the number of job cuts in leisure and hospitality are just as high if measured against the size of the industry and the total number of people employed in it.

Nope, that’s not it. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Labor, provides those numbers. According to the latest statistics posted on its website (2006), the Leisure and Hospitality industry employs over 13 million people in America. Compare this to just over 7 million for Professional and Business Services, just under 10 million for construction and just over 14 million for Retail.

Clearly, Leisure and Hospitality is a huge industry providing jobs to legions of workers. It includes three different categories: hotels and other accommodations; arts, entertainment and recreation; and food services and drinking places. And apparently not as many people are losing their jobs in these sectors as in other industries.

In fact, the Travel Industry Association released its annual travel forecast in December combined with results from their latetst travelhorizonsTM survey. The conclusion was that there is no reason for doom and gloom in the land of the all-inclusive. “Despite current economic conditions and lagging consumer confidence,” reports the press release from last month,” fully half (48%) of all respondents stated they were not planning any changes to their future travel plans as result of the recent turmoil in the financial markets.”

However, seven out of ten (67%) “plan to stay fewer nights” and a comparable percentage expects to “spend less on food, beverages and entertainment” when traveling.

So maybe we’re just indulging more closer to home?

I suppose the only conclusion when comparing the overall stats is that we’d rather cut down on electronics, cars and clothing than give up drinking ourselves out of our doldrums, prepare meals ourselves or go without escape through entertainment. Party on, dude.