WARN Act and Offshoring — When Jobs Move Overseas, Do Workers Still Get 60 Days' Notice?

When a company announces it is moving jobs overseas, the news usually focuses on where the work is going. Workers left behind ask a more practical question: do we still get a layoff notice? Yes. The WARN Act does not care why jobs are disappearing. It cares how many, where, and how much warning workers got.

The reason for the layoff does not matter

The federal WARN Act requires employers with 100 or more full-time employees to give 60 days' written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff. A plant closing is the shutdown of a single site of employment that causes employment loss for 50 or more full-time workers within 30 days. A mass layoff is an employment loss for 500 or more workers at one site, or for 50 to 499 workers if they make up at least one-third of the site's workforce.

Nothing in that test asks about the business reason. A factory that closes because work moved to another country is treated exactly the same as a factory that closes because demand fell. If the numbers cross the threshold, the 60-day clock applies. If they do not, no federal WARN notice is owed, whatever the reason.

There is no offshoring exception

The WARN Act has only three narrow exceptions, and none covers a planned move overseas: a faltering company actively seeking capital or business that would have avoided the layoff, a sudden and unexpected event outside the employer's control (unforeseeable business circumstances), or a natural disaster.

A decision to move work abroad is a planned business decision, made over weeks or months. That makes it foreseeable by definition, so the unforeseeable-circumstances exception does not apply. An employer cannot announce a move overseas on Monday and end jobs on Friday and call the timing a surprise. The 60-day rule exists to give workers time to plan, and a planned relocation is exactly the kind of layoff it was written for.

How the count works when work moves

Offshoring often involves more than one location, and the count is done site by site: 50 workers at one plant and 40 at another do not add up to a 90-worker mass layoff unless the sites genuinely function as one location, which is rare. But losses within any 90-day period are added together, so an employer cannot dodge the threshold by moving jobs abroad in small batches: two rounds of 30 cuts at the same site inside 90 days count as 60.

Employment loss has a specific meaning: a termination other than a discharge for cause, a voluntary departure, or a retirement; a layoff lasting more than six months; or a cut in hours of more than 50 percent for six months or more. A transfer offer can change the picture: a genuine offer of a comparable job within a reasonable commuting distance, turned down, may not count as an employment loss. An offer to follow the job overseas is a different story.

What the notice has to say, and who gets it

When notice is owed, it goes to the affected workers or their union representative, to the state's dislocated worker unit, and to the chief elected official of the local government. It must state whether the action is a plant closing or a mass layoff, whether it is permanent or temporary, the expected date, and the job titles and number of workers affected. Workers can check whether a notice was filed in their state's WARN list or the Layoff Atlas registry.

What to do if your job is moving overseas

First, get the dates in writing: the notice date and the effective date. If the gap is shorter than 60 days without a valid exception, the employer may owe back pay and benefits for each day of the shortfall, up to 60 days. Second, check your state's law. Some states go further: New Jersey requires 90 days' notice and mandatory severance, New York requires 90 days' notice at 50 employees, and California's mini-WARN applies at 50 employees. Third, contact your state's Rapid Response team and your local American Job Center before the effective date. Their help — job-search assistance, resume help, sometimes funded training — is free, but you usually have to sign up. Workers whose jobs were lost to foreign trade should also ask about trade-related assistance programs, which have historically offered extended income support and training beyond regular unemployment.

What the data shows — and what it cannot

The Layoff Atlas registry currently lists 669 WARN notices affecting 61,403 reported workers in the 90-day window, with 29 worker counts unavailable. California leads the states with 22,043 reported workers, followed by Washington with 17,333. The coming weeks are heavy: 7,371 workers are scheduled for the week of November 13, and 7,181 for the week of November 20.

Those figures describe reported plans, not confirmed job losses. And the registry cannot separate offshoring-driven cuts from any other kind: filings record the employer, the site, the worker count, and the dates — not the business reason. A closure caused by a move overseas looks exactly like any other closure in the data. The law treats them the same, so the numbers do too.

Data source: Layoff Atlas