Largest WARN Act Layoffs by Workers Affected
Top 50 employers affecting the most workers through WARN Act layoff and closure notices.
What This Ranking Tells Us
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers with 100+ workers to provide 60-day advance notice of mass layoffs and plant closings. This ranking shows employers whose layoff notices have affected the most total workers. Large numbers can result from a single massive layoff event or accumulated smaller events over time. These numbers represent real workers who lost their jobs and had to find new employment.
Reading This Ranking in Context
This ranking of "largest warn act layoffs by workers affected" is computed directly from the underlying PlainEmployers dataset — no editorial cherry-picking, no paid placements. 50 employers currently qualify for this ranking based on our minimum-filing and minimum-record thresholds. At position one, SUNDQUIST FRUIT (WA) leads the list with a workers of 20,250,919, a figure pulled directly from the most recent federal or state disclosure rather than corporate self-reporting. The underlying source — WARN Act notices filed with state agencies — is a legally mandated filing, which is why we treat it as the authoritative signal rather than survey data or crowd-sourced reviews.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers with 100+ workers to provide 60-day advance notice of mass layoffs and plant closings. This ranking shows employers whose layoff notices have affected the most total workers. Large numbers can result from a single massive layoff event or accumulated smaller events over time. These numbers represent real workers who lost their jobs and had to find new employment. Across the 50 employers on this specific list, the median workers sits at approximately 62,150, so a visitor comparing an individual employer's profile page against this ranking can quickly see whether they're near the top of the list, the middle, or just above the qualifying threshold. That context matters: a rank of 40 on a list of 50 means something very different from a rank of 40 on a list of 2,000, and the ranking page surfaces both the position and the value so readers can judge significance for themselves.
Every row links back to an individual employer profile with the full underlying records — H-1B filing dates and disclosed salaries by job title, OSHA DART rates with total injury counts, WARN Act notices with dates and affected headcount. That drill-down is deliberate: a ranking number in isolation doesn't tell a jobseeker, reporter, or compliance researcher what they need to know, but combined with the per-employer disclosure trail it becomes actionable. PlainEmployers re-runs these rankings on a recurring ETL schedule, so newly filed federal disclosures and state WARN notices update the leaderboard without manual intervention, and retired records fall off as they age beyond the relevance window. Cross-reference this ranking with the industry and metro pages to see whether the pattern is concentrated in specific sectors or geographies.
Source: WARN Act notices filed with state agencies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What triggers a WARN Act notice?
The WARN Act requires 60-day advance notice for: plant closings affecting 50+ workers at a single site, mass layoffs of 500+ workers, or layoffs of 50-499 workers if they constitute 33% of the workforce at that site. Exceptions exist for unforeseeable business circumstances, natural disasters, and faltering companies actively seeking capital.
Does a large WARN number mean the company is failing?
Not always. Large companies restructure divisions, close facilities in one location while opening in another, and make strategic workforce shifts. A single large WARN event may reflect a one-time restructuring rather than ongoing decline. However, multiple WARN events from the same employer over time is a stronger signal of instability.
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Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.