The news of major U.S. job losses in March is ominous for a number of workforce management reasons.

The U.S. Labor Department said Friday, April 4, that the American economy lost 80,000 payroll jobs in March. That was worse than expected and the biggest one-month loss in five years. Payroll employment figures also were revised to show greater job losses for January and February, and the unemployment rate rose from 4.8 percent in February to 5.1 percent in March.

The first problem with these numbers is they suggest companies are ignoring the sage advice to try to weather the economic storm by limiting layoffs or avoiding them altogether. Instead of taking a near-term hit to profits and investing in long-term growth, companies seem to be cutting jobs heavily.

Such short-term thinking could come back to haunt U.S. firms. Jettisoning talent and potentially damaging morale for remaining workers can cripple companies and their ability to bounce back in better times. Stanford University business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer says companies tend to give up people too easily in downturns only to pay a steep price for talent during good times. “You should not do what most companies seem to do, which is buy high and sell low,” Pfeffer says. “There’s an unwillingness for companies to behave counter-cyclically.”

McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg argues that the U.S. penchant for axing workers gives Europe an edge in recovering from a recession. “Europe is better prepared. Much better,” Mintzberg says. “The soul of the enterprise is much more intact in Europe. There’s much more respect for the idea of collective effort there.”

Then there are “tragedy of the commons” concerns about widespread layoffs. Each job cut can help push the overall U.S. economy into recession—or deeper into one—as consumer spending and confidence suffer.

U.S. stagnation in turn threatens to tip other parts of the world into economic trouble. Asian companies and economies depend heavily on the spending of U.S. consumers and businesses.

A vicious circle can come into play, as foreign countries’ woes afflict U.S. exporters and further depress the American economy.

To be sure, some companies can’t help but lay off workers in dire circumstances. And economic turmoil requires government leadership in addition to smart actions by businesses. What’s more, there are some enlightened companies that behave “counter-cyclically.”

But are there enough to keep the U.S. economy from sliding further?

Friday’s employment report from the U.S. Department of Labor is a great reminder of how statistics can mislead—and another sign of brewing trouble for the global economy.

The U.S. economy lost 63,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in February, the largest monthly decline since March 2003. But the official unemployment rate actually fell slightly, from 4.9 percent to 4.8 percent. So is the job situation improving or worsening? And why the seemingly contradictory numbers?

The two sets of statistics come from different government surveys. But it’s not as if the payroll employment figure—which comes from a survey of business and government establishments—is somehow missing a big jump in employment captured in the unemployment rate, which comes from a survey of households. The household survey found a decrease of 255,000 employed individuals from January to February. But the unemployment rate edged down because the civilian labor force shrank by 450,000.

The civilian labor force is defined as the sum of employed and unemployed people. Sounds simple enough. But the “unemployed” category is a bit tricky: People only get counted as such if they had no employment during the reference week of the survey, they were available for work at that time and “they made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the four-week period ending with the reference week,” as the Labor Department puts it.

That means the unemployed tally excludes “discouraged workers.” They are defined as people who wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but who hadn’t done so in the previous four weeks because they believed no jobs were available for them. There were 396,000 discouraged workers in February.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has an interesting column this week  saying that the employment rate of Americans in their prime years, 25 to 54 years old, has been falling, even as the unemployment rate has been declining. That means one of two things, he says: Either a growing number of people have been choosing not to work purely by their own volition, or there’s been a rise in the number of folks who aren’t working and aren’t actively looking but would like to find a good job. The latter, he says, appears to be the better explanation.

“[T]hese nonemployed workers tend to be those who have been left behind by the economic changes of the last generation,” Leonhardt writes. “Their jobs have been replaced by technology or have gone overseas, and they can no longer find work that pays as well.”

The latest U.S. employment figures not only point to a decline in consumer spending power, which bodes poorly for both the American and world economies. They also suggest Americans’ support for global trade may weaken further. Although Washington officials passed a stimulus package aimed at boosting the U.S. economy, the measure fell short of seriously strengthening the economic safety net into which many U.S. workers are falling.

Will American workers, at some point, decide that the global economy as it is set up just doesn’t work for them?

Signs keep pointing to a global economic slowdown. But big companies are poised to do a better job of managing their talent during tough times than they were in recessions past.

The latest gloomy news came Friday from research group the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD said a measure of leading economic indicators suggests that a slowdown in economic activity lies ahead in the OECD area, which primarily consists of developed nations. China isn’t a member country, but the OECD said data points to a potential downturn there. Continued expansion is ahead in Brazil, India and Russia, the OECD said.

Those bright spots in the forecast aren’t the only good news, though. There’s evidence companies have grown smarter about handling their workforces amid shrinking sales. The mass layoffs of the ’80s and ’90s and of the dot-com bust may have saved money in the short run, but those sweeping cuts probably cost firms a good many excellent workers able to create value in the long term. And companies seem to get that. Recruiting and retaining the right talent has become a priority for executives. What’s more, there’s a growing sense that layoffs can backfire for individual firms and erode the quality and even the mental health of the American workforce.

Ideally, companies constantly are taking stock of their talent and offering volunteer separation packages to workers who don’t fit, says Wayne Cascio, a management professor at the University of Colorado who has studied corporate restructurings. Cascio expects to see some involuntary layoffs ahead, but he thinks companies will make more targeted job cuts based on employee assessments.

“They’re really going to do everything in their power to retain pivotal employees,” he says.

Software systems for employee performance management and succession planning should help. Large firms have been investing in these applications in recent years partly to identify and groom key employees in case of talent shortages. The same software tools should be able to help firms pick out the people to preserve amid any job cuts. For example, the products make it easy to compare employee performance and potential ratings. Decades ago, with annual reviews stored in file cabinets, such talent analysis was harder to do.

“Corporate America should have a lot more data than they had last time they did layoffs,” says Rick Fletcher, president of technology consulting firm HRchitect.

What do you think? Do you expect firms to take a wiser approach to the workforce should times get tougher? E-mail me at efrauenheim@workforce.com.