Taken from MSNBC

The Year of the Ox got off to an inauspicious start for American workers.
A slew of American heavyweight companies, including Caterpillar, Pfizer, Sprint Nextel, Home Depot and General Motors, announced thousands of job cuts Monday. What's more, a group of business economists predicted many more job losses in the year ahead.

Caterpillar had by far the worst news of the group. The world's largest heavy equipment maker announced Monday it was slashing up to 5,000 jobs on top of several earlier actions. The latest cuts of support and management employees will be made globally by the end of March. An additional 2,500 workers already have accepted buyout offers, and ties have been severed with about 8,000 contract workers worldwide. In addition, about 4,000 full-time factory workers already have been let go.
In all, the job losses equal about 18 percent of the company's work force.

Ailing automaker General Motors Corp. also said it would slash 2,000 jobs at plants in Michigan and Ohio as the recession slams sales of its vehicles.

Sprint Nextel Corp. said it would be eliminating about 8,000 positions in the first quarter as it seeks to cut annual costs by $1.2 billion.

Home Depot said it would reduce about two percent of its associates, or about 7,000 jobs.

And Pfizer, fresh from agreeing to buy rival Wyeth for $68 billion, announced cost cuts that will include slashing about 8,000 jobs.

Ok so doing the math that is about 44,500 people will be without jobs in the US by April of this year.

Mind you MicroSoft had also announced that they would be cutting some 5,000 jobs as well on Friday gone.

So with the US recession beginning to spin slowly out of control the real question is how long before this reaches us.

Already I have been hearing that companies like PepsiCo has sent home about 20 persons and BP is also once again looking at cutting more jobs. Certain "Service/Support type for the Oil giants which were bases in Guyaguyare have also closed up shop putting quite a few people from that area out of a job. - amazing that our local press has not yet picked up on these "restructuring" maneuvers being made by so many companies