For almost two months now, a slew of big American as well as foreign companies have been announcing major layoffs, which has been clouding the outlook for the employment in the United States.

If you remember, it began in early September when Hewlett-Packard announced that its spinoff could mean up to 30,000 job cuts in the follow months.

As you know this week also saw a slew of layoffs that announced at 3M, Biogen, Credit Suisse, Disney’s ESPN and Perrigo.

Now, according to a recent report by outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in the month of September we saw a 43 percent increase from the previous month in terms of job cuts. We also saw cuts that were 93 percent higher than the 30,477 planned layoffs announced the same month a year ago.

So what does this tell us? In a nutshell, there are many more lay-off this year than last year. In fact his year, there have been more layoffs announced than in the whole year of 2014. That’s a lot. The other interesting fact is that we see a higher number of layoffs at the surface but that’s odd as weekly jobless claims fall to historic lows.

So what does that all mean?

It means people are simply transitioning through unemployment for shorter periods of time. This means that people are becoming unemployed and then move into a job, possibly a transitionary job, while they seek other employment. It can also mean that other businesses are taking advantage of the new pools of workers and using those to build up their own organizations.