U.S. Companies Take Hatchet to Jobs Again : Economy: Despite improved outlook for earnings, firms turn to layoffs again to trim costs and fatten profits.

With U.S. companies expected to post healthy second-quarter earnings, it might seem like a good time to look for a job. But corporate America has something different in mind.

Layoffs, which have become a regular occurrence in California, seem to be back in force and growing nationwide. Two organizations that track corporate layoff announcements report significant increases in June from a month earlier.

Government data reported last week seems to corroborate their findings. The nation’s unemployment rate grew to 7.0% in June from 6.9% in May. For people out of work, concerned about losing their jobs or just looking to change jobs, the pain continues.

Particularly disturbing, economists and others say, is that the increase in job cutbacks comes at a time when, during a normal economic recovery, companies ought to be adding jobs.

These ongoing cuts--punctuated by June’s increase--suggest businesses are now operating under a strategy of continuous downsizing, say people who follow employment patterns.

The trend, they add, appears to be permanent.

“The restructuring and downsizing goes on and on and on and on in the U.S. economy, as company after company uses cost cutting to grow profits in a soft-revenue world,” said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Economic Advisers Inc.

“Keeping the head count down is the primary corporate strategy these days, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” he said.

Corporate managers have learned that productivity gains can be achieved constantly if workers are pushed enough, Sinai said. Common today is the complaint that individuals are being given work assigned to two or three people just a few years ago.

“It’s a brutal time for American workers,” Sinai said.

ISI Group Inc., an economic research firm based in New York, keeps a tally of layoff announcements in major media. It found that such announcements in June rose to 40 from 19 a year ago. In an earlier report, it pegged May’s layoff announcement tally at 26.

Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a corporate outplacement company in Chicago, found by tallying media reports that the number of jobs either cut or otherwise reduced in June jumped 175% from May.

Of course, data such as ISI’s and Challenger Gray’s is necessarily anecdotal. Hard numbers are not easily found. The government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics used to keep track of mass layoffs, but the program was canceled in 1992--ironically, in a funding squeeze.

Why are the increased layoffs coming now, in June?

Audrey Freedman, president of Audrey Freedman & Associates, a management consulting firm in New York, said the announcements were probably moves that companies had put off in hopes of a surge in the economy.

“First, that expectation got strung out until 1992,” Freedman said. Then, he added, “unrealistically, I think, people were expecting a snap up after the Clinton election.”

The bounce never came. And after a while, Freedman said, managers simply ran out of time and decided to press ahead with job cuts.

Those managers were reacting, Freedman said, to competitive pressures to reduce prices for their goods and services. With weak overall economic growth, companies have been forced to fight for customers by cutting prices.

Reducing work forces--and therefore expenses--is seen as the answer.

“Our business is a competitive business,” said John Correnti, president of Nucor Corp., a steel producer based in Charlotte, N.C. “You have to be the low-cost, or one of the low-cost, quality suppliers-producers.”