ImmigrationClock explains · Workforce data
What a WARN notice is
Sixty days' notice of a mass layoff, filed with the state — and silent on immigration status.
The facts
- The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires covered employers, generally those with 100 or more employees, to give 60 calendar days' written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff as the Act defines them.
- Notice goes to the affected workers or their representatives, to the state's dislocated worker unit, and to the local government. Many states publish the notices they receive.
- Several states have their own laws with lower thresholds or longer notice periods, so a notice in one state is not always comparable to a notice in another.
- A WARN notice records an employer, a location, a date and a headcount. It says nothing about the immigration status of the workers affected.
- ImmigrationClock aggregates the notices published by the states that offer a machine-readable feed, and says which states those are. It is a growing subset, not a national total.
Why it matters
WARN notices are the earliest public record of a layoff, which is why they are worth tracking, and they are routinely misread as a record of who was laid off. They are a record of how many, and where.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Labor — Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN)↗
- 29 U.S.C. § 2101 — WARN Act definitions↗
- 29 U.S.C. § 2102 — notice required before plant closings and mass layoffs↗
Every sentence above was written by a person from these sources and last checked against them on Sep 2, 2026.
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