At Small Bizs, Hiring Slips

The Wall Street Journal says hiring momentum among small businesses reversed course last month following eight months of modest growth, a national report released Wednesday shows.

Businesses that employ fewer than 50 workers cut 14,000 jobs, as did businesses with between 50 and 499 workers, according to payroll company Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.

Prior to September, small businesses had been adding a few thousand jobs every month since January. But those gains were in no way comparable to what happened when the last economic downturn came to an end in 2003, says Joel Prakken, senior managing director and co-founder of St. Louis-based Macroeconomic Advisers. “Small businesses in that scenario were adding a lot more jobs than they have been recently,” he says.

To be sure, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees did add 6,000 service-sector jobs last month. But the growth was muted by a loss of 20,000 jobs at businesses of the same size in the goods-producing sector, which includes companies in manufacturing, construction and resource extraction. Goods-producing businesses with between 50 and 499 employees eliminated 12,000 jobs.

Photo by Reuters.

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