WARN Act mass layoff and plant closure notices in Kohala Coast, Hawaii, updated daily.
Workers affected by industry sector
| Company | City | Employees | Notice Date | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fairmont Orchid | Kohala Coast | 83 | 2021-02-08 | Layoff |
| Mauna Lani, Auberge Resorts Collection | Kohala Coast | 49 | 2021-01-14 | Layoff |
| Fairmont Orchid | Kohala Coast | 258 | 2020-10-01 | Layoff |
| Fairmont Orchid | Kohala Coast | 0 | 2020-09-28 | Layoff |
| Fairmont Orchid | Kohala Coast | 0 | 2020-07-23 | Layoff |
| Mauna Lani | Kohala Coast | 651 | 2020-03-23 | Layoff |
# Economic Analysis: Layoffs in Kohala Coast, Hawaii
Between 2020 and 2021, Kohala Coast experienced a concentrated wave of workforce reductions that displaced 1,041 workers across six separate WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) notices. While six notices might appear modest in absolute terms, the concentration of these layoffs within a geographically isolated, tourism-dependent community represents a significant economic shock. The 1,041 affected workers constitute a substantial portion of the Kohala Coast's hospitality workforce, which serves as the primary economic engine for this remote northwestern region of Hawaii's Big Island.
The temporal clustering of these layoffs—four notices filed in 2020 and two in 2021—points to a crisis response rather than gradual workforce adjustment. This pattern aligns with the broader COVID-19 pandemic's devastating impact on Hawaii's tourism sector, which contracted sharply as travel restrictions and consumer caution eliminated the visitor economy that sustains coastal resort communities. For Kohala Coast, a region with limited economic diversification, this disruption created immediate and severe hardship for workers and their families.
The Kohala Coast layoff landscape is dominated by two major resort operators: Fairmont Orchid and Mauna Lani, which together account for 1,041 displaced workers—representing 100 percent of all WARN notices filed in the region during this period.
Fairmont Orchid, operating under the Fairmont Hotels & Resorts brand, filed four separate WARN notices affecting 341 workers. The multiple notices over the two-year period suggest layoffs were not implemented as a single event but rather staged in phases as the resort operators assessed the severity and duration of the pandemic's impact on tourism demand. This sequential approach may reflect initial uncertainty about whether the downturn would be brief or prolonged, leading management to implement successive rounds of cuts as recovery timelines repeatedly extended.
Mauna Lani, by contrast, filed a single notice affecting 651 workers—the largest single workforce reduction on record for Kohala Coast during this period. Additionally, Mauna Lani, Auberge Resorts Collection filed a separate notice affecting 49 workers, reflecting organizational complexity as the property transitioned between operating structures or as different divisions of the same hospitality group filed independently. Collectively, the Mauna Lani entities accounted for 700 workers, making them responsible for roughly 67 percent of all layoffs tracked in Kohala Coast during 2020-2021.
The dominance of these two properties underscores a critical vulnerability in Kohala Coast's economic structure: employment concentration among a handful of large operators with vulnerability to external shocks. Unlike diversified metropolitan labor markets, Kohala Coast workers lack alternative major employers to absorb displaced workforce capacity, creating both immediate hardship and longer-term community strain.
The industry breakdown reveals a revealing absence: only one WARN notice—affecting 49 workers—is formally categorized under "Accommodation & Food," despite the obvious reality that all three major operators (Fairmont Orchid and Mauna Lani entities) operate hotel and resort properties with substantial food service components. This apparent discrepancy likely reflects WARN notice filing classification practices, where large hospitality properties often categorize their primary operations under broader headings rather than "Accommodation & Food."
What the data actually demonstrates is the near-total dominance of tourism-related employment in Kohala Coast's formal economy. The 1,041 layoffs represent a near-total economic sector—the hospitality industry that depends almost entirely on discretionary visitor spending. These positions encompassed housekeeping, food service, maintenance, administrative, and guest services roles that represent the foundation of employment for both skilled and less-skilled workers throughout the region.
The structural problem is unambiguous: Kohala Coast lacks economic diversification. Beyond tourism, the region has minimal agricultural operations, light manufacturing, professional services clusters, or government employment to provide alternative job opportunities. This narrow employment base creates severe cyclicality—when tourism contracts, unemployment spikes sharply because there are few alternative sectors to absorb displaced workers. The 2020-2021 crisis exemplified this dynamic in its most severe form.
The temporal distribution of WARN notices—four in 2020 and two in 2021—reflects a distinct crisis pattern rather than gradual restructuring. The concentration in 2020 suggests that resort operators moved quickly to right-size their operations in response to the immediate collapse of tourism demand following pandemic-related travel restrictions and consumer pullback. The continuation of layoffs into 2021, despite initial hopes that vaccines would enable tourism recovery, indicates that recovery proved slower and less complete than anticipated.
This two-year concentration pattern differs markedly from normal economic cycles, where layoffs are typically distributed across longer periods as businesses adjust to market conditions gradually. The pandemic-driven shock compressed workforce reductions into an exceptionally brief window, creating simultaneous job loss across thousands of workers in a confined geography. Recovery from such concentrated workforce disruption is demonstrably slower than recovery from distributed layoffs, because communities lack time to develop retraining programs, alternative employment pathways, or gradual economic reorientation.
Without WARN data extending beyond 2021, the trajectory after 2021 remains opaque from this dataset. However, publicly available information on Hawaii tourism recovery suggests that visitor arrivals rebounded significantly by late 2021 and into 2022, raising questions about whether Kohala Coast resorts rehired displaced workers or instead operated with reduced permanent staffing supplemented by flexible and contract labor arrangements.
The displacement of 1,041 workers in a geographically isolated resort community carries consequences far beyond simple unemployment statistics. Kohala Coast's geographic isolation—it is located on the northwestern shore of Hawaii's Big Island, roughly 45 minutes from the nearest major city of Hilo—means that displaced workers cannot easily commute to alternative employment in other regions. This geographic constraint forces three outcomes: workers either relocate away from the community entirely, accept unemployment and workforce exits, or commute long distances to secure employment elsewhere.
Large-scale worker displacement in isolated communities typically triggers secondary economic effects that amplify the initial layoff impact. Reduced consumer spending from displaced workers affects local retail, restaurants, and service providers. Property tax bases may decline if workers sell homes and leave. Housing demand softens, potentially triggering property value declines that further constrain household wealth. Over time, reduced population can trigger school enrollment declines, forcing education budget cuts and potentially degrading service quality—which further accelerates worker and family departures.
The psychological and social effects merit recognition alongside economic metrics. Worker displacement from long-term resort employment disrupts not only income but community identity and social networks. For workers who spent years or decades in hospitality employment, displacement can trigger trauma, depression, and family stress that extends well beyond the period of unemployment.
Hawaii's economy contracted more severely during the pandemic than most U.S. states, given the outsized importance of tourism to the state's employment and tax base. Statewide, tourism employment declined by approximately 70 percent in 2020 before gradually recovering through 2021 and beyond. The tourism-dependent economy meant that virtually every coastal resort community throughout Hawaii experienced major workforce reductions.
Within this statewide context, Kohala Coast's 1,041 layoffs represent a particularly severe concentration for a single region. The isolation of Kohala Coast and its overwhelming dependence on a small number of large resort employers made the community especially vulnerable compared to more diversified regions like Honolulu, which maintains substantial government, military, healthcare, and professional services employment that provided some economic resilience during the tourism collapse.
The Kohala Coast crisis also highlights disparities in economic resilience across Hawaii's geography. Large metropolitan areas possessed more alternative employment, more diverse tax bases to maintain public services, and greater capacity to absorb displaced workers. Isolated rural resort communities like Kohala Coast possessed none of these advantages, making pandemic-driven tourism collapse an existential threat to community economic viability.
The Kohala Coast layoff crisis reveals fundamental structural vulnerabilities in economies built exclusively around tourism and resort employment. The concentration of 1,041 layoffs among three employer entities demonstrates the fragility inherent in extreme employment concentration. The geographical isolation that makes Kohala Coast attractive as a luxury destination simultaneously makes it economically vulnerable, as workers lack convenient alternative employment if primary employers contract operations.
Long-term economic stability for Kohala Coast will require deliberate economic diversification efforts that extend beyond tourism. This might encompass remote professional employment, light manufacturing, renewable energy industries, or agricultural expansion—all of which could provide employment opportunities disconnected from visitor demand cycles. Without such diversification, Kohala Coast remains structurally vulnerable to future tourism shocks, whether from pandemics, economic recession, or gradual shifts in travel patterns.
The data also underscores the inadequacy of WARN notice protections as economic stabilization mechanisms. While WARN requires 60 days' advance notice of major layoffs, providing workers time to seek alternative employment, it offers no direct assistance in retraining, relocation, or income support. For workers in isolated communities with limited alternative employment, WARN notice alone provides little practical protection against displacement and its cascading economic consequences.
Get Kohala Coast Layoff Alerts
Free daily alerts for WARN Act filings in Hawaii.
