WARN Act mass layoff and plant closure notices in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, updated daily.
Workers affected by industry sector
Workers affected by notice type
# Fort Lauderdale's Layoff Landscape: A Deep Dive into Workforce Disruption
Fort Lauderdale has experienced substantial workforce disruption over the past quarter-century, with 184 WARN notices displacing 24,784 workers across the city. This figure represents a significant economic shock to a metropolitan area with a 2020 population of approximately 180,000 residents, suggesting that roughly 14 percent of the city's entire population has been affected by mass layoff events tracked through federal WARN Act filings. The sheer volume of displacement—nearly 25,000 workers—underscores the volatile nature of Fort Lauderdale's economy and the concentration of layoff risk across several key industry sectors that anchor the region's employment base.
The distribution of these notices across time and employers reveals patterns that reflect both local economic cycles and broader national disruptions. While 184 notices might initially seem scattered across three decades, the temporal concentration of these events tells a more dramatic story. The majority of layoff activity clusters around specific economic crises and industry-specific downturns, suggesting that Fort Lauderdale's economy is particularly vulnerable to shocks in sectors that dominate local employment.
Transportation emerges as the most precarious sector in Fort Lauderdale's employment landscape, accounting for 36 WARN notices affecting 7,842 workers—nearly one-third of all documented displacement. This concentration creates systemic risk, as disruptions in airlines and ground transportation ripple through the entire regional economy. Spirit Airlines and its various subsidiaries filed four separate WARN notices affecting 987 workers, while Spirit Airlines, Inc. at Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport filed two additional notices impacting 957 workers. Combined, Spirit Airlines represented approximately 1,944 workers across six distinct notices, establishing the carrier as the single most significant source of workforce volatility in the region. The repeated filing pattern—six notices from the same employer over the tracking period—suggests chronic instability rather than a single catastrophic event, indicating ongoing operational challenges within the company's Fort Lauderdale operations.
The airport itself functions as a critical employment hub and economic anchor, making airline instability particularly consequential. Beyond Spirit Airlines, ground transportation companies including The Hertz Corporation and Avis Budget Car Rental filed notices affecting 227 workers combined. When combined with Spirit Airlines' impact, transportation companies directly associated with Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport account for over 2,200 workers—a figure that understates the actual impact when considering indirect employment in ground services, hospitality, and retail sectors that depend on passenger traffic.
Accommodation and food services represent the second-largest source of displacement with 26 notices affecting 4,841 workers. This sector's vulnerability reflects both the cyclical nature of tourism-dependent economies and structural shifts in hospitality employment. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. filed two notices affecting 496 workers, while smaller establishments like Grille 66 & Bar documented 117 workers across two notices. The hospitality sector's dominance in layoff filings suggests that Fort Lauderdale's position as a major tourist and cruise destination creates employment that is inherently unstable, subject to seasonal fluctuations, economic downturns, and shifts in consumer travel patterns.
Finance and insurance sectors, typically more stable, generated 15 notices affecting 1,279 workers. Bank of America filed four notices affecting 457 workers, representing the second-largest single employer by notice frequency. The financial sector's representation in WARN filings reflects the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its extended aftermath, when banking sector consolidation and mortgage-related business contraction reshaped employment across Florida's financial centers.
Professional services, particularly the legal sector, appears in the data through Ben-Ezra & Katz, P.A., which filed three notices affecting 381 workers. This suggests significant restructuring within Fort Lauderdale's professional services cluster, though the limited information available prevents deeper analysis of the drivers behind these reductions.
The temporal distribution of WARN notices reveals three distinct periods of elevated displacement activity. The first cluster occurred during the early 2000s recession, with 2001 representing the peak year of that era at 13 notices. This period corresponds with the post-9/11 aviation industry collapse and the broader dot-com recession that severely impacted technology sectors nationwide.
The second major crisis occurred during the 2008-2009 financial collapse and subsequent Great Recession. While 2008 saw 10 notices, the impact extended forward with layoff activity continuing through subsequent years. The financial crisis created dual pressure on Fort Lauderdale's economy—direct impact through banking and real estate sector collapse, and indirect impact through reduced tourism and hospitality demand as consumer spending contracted nationally.
The most dramatic concentration appears in 2020, when 55 WARN notices were filed—representing nearly 30 percent of all notices in the entire three-decade tracking period. This unprecedented spike corresponds directly with the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated transportation and hospitality sectors simultaneously. The sudden halt in air travel decimated airline employment, while widespread travel restrictions eliminated tourism-dependent accommodation and food service jobs. Fort Lauderdale, with its critical dependence on these sectors, experienced concentrated pain during this crisis year.
Beyond these crisis periods, the baseline layoff activity during "normal" years typically ranges from one to nine notices annually, suggesting that some level of workforce reduction represents the default state rather than exception. The years 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 each saw minimal activity, but this temporary stability proved illusory—the system quickly returned to elevated displacement activity.
The 2020 pandemic-driven spike deserves particular emphasis because it demonstrates how vulnerable Fort Lauderdale's economy truly is to external shocks. Transportation and accommodation combined for the vast majority of 2020 notices, reflecting the sector-specific catastrophe that air travel and hospitality experienced. This concentration meant that a single exogenous shock—a public health crisis—could trigger mass displacement affecting roughly 10 percent of the documented workers in this analysis within a single year. The recovery pattern visible in subsequent years (one notice in 2021, two in 2022, six in 2023, five in 2024, and six in 2025) suggests a gradual stabilization rather than the type of dramatic bounce-back that might characterize more diversified economies.
Information and technology sectors generated 16 notices affecting 2,212 workers, making this the third-largest displacement sector after transportation and hospitality. Sun Microsystems, Inc. filed two notices affecting 61 workers, a modest contribution that nonetheless reflects the technology sector's presence in Fort Lauderdale. The relatively lower technology sector displacement compared to Florida's larger tech hubs in the Tampa Bay area and Miami suggests that Fort Lauderdale functions more as a satellite tech market rather than a primary technology center, reducing exposure to tech-specific disruptions like the dot-com bubble and periodic industry consolidations.
Healthcare generated 15 notices affecting 1,899 workers, with DaVita contributing two notices affecting 95 workers. Real estate displacement totaled 11 notices affecting 1,188 workers, with Levitt and Sons filing two notices impacting 216 workers. These sectors' representation reflects both the cyclical nature of real estate and healthcare sector consolidation that characterized the post-2008 period. Manufacturing, government, and retail sectors contribute smaller but meaningful displacement figures, suggesting more diversified job losses across the economy rather than concentration solely in tourism-dependent sectors.
The cumulative impact of 24,784 documented layoffs extends far beyond the direct job losses themselves. Each displaced worker represents lost consumer spending, potential household relocation, strain on public assistance systems, and disruption to local community institutions. For a city of 180,000 residents, displacement of over 24,000 workers means that roughly 13-14 percent of the labor force has experienced documented mass layoff events. When accounting for the extended timeframes over which these notices span (early 1998 through 2025), the actual proportion of people affected becomes difficult to calculate precisely, but the figure underscores substantial labor market disruption.
The concentration of displacement in transportation and hospitality sectors creates particular vulnerability for lower-wage workers, who disproportionately populate these industries. While average wage data is not available in this dataset, hospitality and ground transportation positions typically offer wages below the regional median, suggesting that the workers most affected by these layoffs likely lack substantial financial cushions to weather extended unemployment periods.
Fort Lauderdale's layoff patterns reflect both city-specific vulnerabilities and broader Florida economic characteristics. The state's tourism-dependent economy creates similar displacement patterns across Miami, Tampa, and other major metros. However, Fort Lauderdale's particular concentration of airline employment—with Spirit Airlines, a low-cost carrier, maintaining significant operations at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport—creates unique exposure to aviation industry volatility. Florida as a whole ranks among the nation's most tourism-dependent states, but Fort Lauderdale's position as both a major tourist destination and cruise ship embarkation port intensifies this exposure.
The 2020 pandemic's disproportionate impact on Fort Lauderdale, relative to manufacturing-heavy regions elsewhere in the nation, illustrates how economic specialization creates differential vulnerability to various crisis types. While Midwestern manufacturing hubs suffered from trade-related disruptions, Fort Lauderdale's crisis came from the tourism and transportation sectors that generate disproportionate employment in the region.
The data reveals several structural vulnerabilities that should concern policymakers and economic development professionals. First, the economy's heavy reliance on a small number of large employers—Spirit Airlines, Bank of America, Starwood Hotels—creates concentration risk. When these firms experience difficulties, hundreds or thousands of workers face immediate displacement. Second, the sectors generating the most displacement (transportation, hospitality) tend to employ workers with lower average education levels and wages, meaning displacement has outsized social consequences. Third, the repeated nature of many employers' layoff notices suggests these are not isolated incidents but rather ongoing operational challenges, indicating systemic problems rather than temporary disruptions.
The pattern of recovery visible in the post-2020 data suggests cautious stabilization, but the baseline level of layoff activity during non-crisis years indicates that Fort Lauderdale's economy continuously sheds jobs through formal WARN-triggering mass layoffs, suggesting a labor market characterized by instability and churn rather than sustainable, resilient employment growth.
Get Fort Lauderdale Layoff Alerts
Free daily alerts for WARN Act filings in Florida.
