I read somewhere that one of the big concerns was that "corporate layoff" numbers had become such bullsh!t that they were meaningless. Many large companies announced such layoff plans specifically to make it seem as if they were driving down costs, thereby inflating the value of their stocks.
If AT&T announced that they were laying off 10,000 people within the next six months, many of them were people who simply took an early retirement offer and should not have counted in the "layoff" statistics.