The company noted that orders to temporarily close or curtail operations at restaurants and bars in just a dozen US states and Washington, D.C. could negatively affect nearly 7.4 million workers. Challenger cited labor and employment data from the District of Columbia, as well asCalifornia, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state. California, New York and Illinois have the largest number of restaurant and hospitality employees in the country, a total of 3.6 million people. The data do not include recently announced closures in municipalities such as Denver, Dallas and Houston. "It just gives you a general sense of how big these industries are, how significant of an impact this is for small businesses," Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray and Christmas said in an interview with CNN Business.Restaurants have seen a precipitous drop in sales as calls for social distancing evolved into reduced hours for non-essential businesses and mandated temporary closures to ensure people can hunker down and reduce the spread of Covid-19.OpenTable, an online reservation provider for restaurants, reported that dine-in visits were down 56% at its network of 60,000 restaurants nationwide as of Monday. On March 1, sales were up 2% for those businesses, according to OpenTable datak, compared to the same date in 2019.Coronavirus-related job cuts were initially low, but Challenger said they won't stay that way for long. "I thinRead More – Source
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