A hotel chain has announced the largest single layoff of employees since the start of the COVID-19 shut down last Friday, but the state's economy is showing real signs of recovery.
LM Services Corportation, which operates Hilton, Holiday Inn and Sheraton hotels, said 1,468 employees at multiple locations in the St. Louis area were affected. The layoffs are pemanent, the company said.
They are among more than 20,000 revealed by companies since the COVID-19 crisis began in March to the Missouri Department of Workforce Development under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act).
Notices under the act only reveal a small fraction of the job losses in a certain number of smaller to medium sized companies which are required to file them.
Becky Dunn, a spokesperson for the department, said, "The information we have available is limited to the WARN notices that we have received.....
"Not all business closures or layoffs qualify for reporting under the Act, so this list may not cover all impacted businesses."
According to the latest figures, seasonally adjusted employment decreased by 305,100 jobs over the month to the end of April, and by 327,800 jobs over the year in Missouri.
This is the largest one-month and one-year decreases since the current data series began in 1990. The state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate increased to 9.7 percent, tripling since the start of the year. The unemployment rate in the St. Louis is hovering around 11 percent.
According to the WARN notices, nearly ten times as many people were laid off from certain companies since the middle of March than lost their jobs in the previous eight months. But most of the companies reporting have not closed.
Generally, if 50 workers are either permanently or temporarily laid off, then a WARN notice must be filed.
But there are signs of recovery, according to tracktherecovery.org, a project run by Harvard, Brown University and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Those figures reveal that the number of hourly monthly employees dropped by 26.9 percent between the start of the year and near the end of the year. But that compares to a peak of 49.9 percent.
Similary, while average earnings were down 19.6 percent, the high was 52.2 percent. Unemployment is estimated now at 9.41 percent from a peak of 10.1 percent on April 25.