The United States is seeing mass layoffs across the country due to the
coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders. Currently, the unemployment
rate is at an all-time high: 22.5%, the worst since the Great Depression.
Thirty-nine million Americans have lost their jobs in the past nine
weeks,
across all industries, from bartenders to bus drivers to members of the
press.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act of 1988
requires employers to provide a 60-day notice before closing down or
conducting large-scale layoffs of 100 or more employees. Despite this requirement, many companies
also have not filed the paperwork to reflect these layoffs and therefore, the database is unable to account for those lost jobs. Based on this,
183 companies have filed WARN notices and
14,601 jobs
have been lost in California.
Stanford Journalism students filed a federal information request and
compiled all available WARN notices issued to employees in 2020 in the
state of California. The most updated data can also be found on Stanford’s
Big Local News. It is worth noting that this search bar also includes WARN notices
issued before March when the pandemic made more impact in the United
States. The results will show you: company,
type of industry,
layoff data, if they is
unionized, and
how many employees.