Pennsylvania Site Closings & Layoffs

Did you know companies are required to provide 60 days advance written notice of a site closing and mass layoffs that affect 50 or more employees? This is part of the WARN act which applies to companies with 100 or more employees. With such information it would be interesting to see what the closing/layoff trends have been across Pennsylvania (PA). The PA Department of Labor & Industry publishes the numbers here but in a manner that is hard to analyze for trends. Fortunately, Omer Arain¹ has been collecting state data on his site from the various State websites. Through his work and some data scrubbing, I was able to create this interactive report for January 2021 through August 2024:

Key Findings

The top 3 counties with the highest number of layoffs/closings are Philadelphia, Northampton and Allegheny. It’s no surprise that the two most populous counties - Philadelphia & Allegheny - made it to the top 3 as they are home to Philadelphia & Pittsburgh cities. However, it is surprising that Northampton County - ranked 13th in the state by population, made it to the top 3. The main companies that contributed to Northampton’s ranking were XPO Logistics (1,072 in April 2021), Walmart (597 in June 2023) and Zulily LLC (504 in May 2022). The locations were all distribution centers which leads me to believe that the county is a strategic location for distribution centers serving Philadelphia and surrounding counties.

Focusing solely on companies, the top 5 layoffs/closings in a month are:

Logistics (XPO Logistics & Syncreon) is a high burn field as it takes the lion’s share of layoffs/closings in the top 5 companies. Through this exercise I learnt about ARGO AI – an autonomous driving technology startup that shutdown in 2022. Remember when it felt like we were on the cusp of having self-driving roam our streets back then? Apparently Waymo is making waves in Phoenix, San Francisco & Los Angeles as it made Time Magazine’s 100 most Influential companies in 2024.

This was a quick & fun way to get a sense of what is going on in the state in terms of layoffs/closings. The analysis could be further enhanced by examining the layoff/closing numbers per capita in each county. The PA Department of Labor & Industry could also have better controls on layoff/closing submissions from companies. There were counties that didn’t belong to PA in the dataset. Some companies didn’t have layoff/closings numbers at all but should have like David Bridal’s. I had to make some assumptions and omissions to run an analysis.

Did you find this interesting? Would you want a view added to the interactive report? Please let me know!