Tens of thousands of Americans have been made redundant at large companies this year. according to Warn Tracker, a website that tracks upcoming layoffs based on WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988) notices.
The WARN Act mandates that employers conducting large-scale layoffs or closures notify employees as well as state government officials of job losses at least 60 days in advance. WARN notices must be served by companies that have 100 or more full-time employees or 100 or more employees who, in aggregate, work at least 4,000 hours per week, excluding overtime.
Warn Tracker found that 68,455 job losses have occurred just three months into 2024.
The state with the highest number of job losses so far is California. According to the WARN tracker, 18,274 employees have lost their jobs across 298 WARN notices. Washington is in second place with 6,593 layoffs.
Apple contributed to job losses in California this week, not long after it canceled a long-running project to build electric, self-driving cars. According to a new state filing, 614 workers will lose their jobs across eight facilities
Having been warned on March 28, the layoffs will go into effect on May 27, the WARN notice stipulates.
Newsweek has contacted Apple for comment via email outside of normal working hours.
In the Northeast, New York has the third-highest number of redundancies with 6,563 positions terminated in 2024. Only companies in three other states have laid off more than 3,000 workers this year, with Texas, Florida and Ohio rounding out the top six with 4,642, 3,335 and 3,151, respectively.
This week, Citigroup announced it would cut the jobs of 430 employees in New York across multiple departments as a cost-saving measure. The company filed four WARN notices with the state Department of Labor that indicate the layoffs will take effect June 29.
The company said that over the next two years, it plans to reduce its workforce by 20,000 employees, amounting to savings of more than $2 billion.
Other mass layoffs have been reported in the education sector, though many do not require a WARN notice as the amounts are short of the threshold for which a notice is necessary. Redundancies have also been reported in Illinois, where four factories have announced they intend to lay off more than 1,000 employees due to manufacturing costs, revenue losses and the need to relocate operations.
Despite the layoffs, U.S. employers added 303,000 jobs in March on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to a report by the Labor Department issued on April 5. It marks the 39th consecutive month of job growth and the national unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent from 3.9 in February.
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