in the Old Post Office in July and has about 1,000 employees in the Chicago area, is also making cuts. In a statement, a company spokesperson said the cuts were not about cost savings.
“So much of the conversation gets dominated by what’s happening in Silicon Valley,” said Todd Thibodeaux, CEO of the tech industry group CompTIA. “That’s really a small fraction of employment in the industry broadly.” The overall jobs picture is still somewhat rosier than the situation in tech, although the Federal Reserve’s plan to keep raising interest rates in an effort to combat inflation. In November, the unemployment rate in Illinois increased by a tenth of a point to 4.7%.
The construction industry is still adding jobs — in Illinois, construction added 2,400 jobs between October and November, according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — but Swonk expects to see layoffs in housing construction going forward.