WARN Act mass layoff and plant closure notices in Lewiston, Idaho, updated daily.
Workers affected by industry sector
| Company | City | Employees | Notice Date | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WinCo Foods | Lewiston | 11 | 2016-06-30 | |
| DCS Facility Svcs - WinCo Foods#128 | Lewiston | 11 | 2016-06-30 | |
| Clearwater Paper | Lewiston | 250 | 2011-10-26 |
# Economic Analysis: Layoffs in Lewiston, Idaho
Lewiston, Idaho has experienced modest but concentrated workforce disruption over the past fifteen years, with three WARN notices affecting 272 workers since 2011. While this figure may appear small relative to larger metropolitan areas, the concentration of job losses in a city of roughly 32,000 residents carries significant proportional weight. The 272 affected workers represent approximately 0.85 percent of Lewiston's total population—a meaningful share of the local labor force that warrants serious attention to underlying economic drivers and community resilience.
The temporal clustering of these layoffs reveals a particular vulnerability window. Two of the three notices occurred in 2016, suggesting a concentrated shock to the local economy during that specific year. This pattern indicates that Lewiston did not experience gradual workforce decline across the decade, but rather faced acute disruptions at specific moments that likely created ripple effects through local retail, housing, and service sectors dependent on wage-earning employees.
Clearwater Paper dominates the layoff narrative in Lewiston with overwhelming significance. The company's single WARN notice accounts for 250 of the 272 affected workers—representing 91.9 percent of all job losses documented in the city's recent WARN filing history. This extraordinary concentration means that understanding Clearwater Paper's workforce decisions is essentially understanding Lewiston's recent layoff experience.
As a major forest products manufacturer, Clearwater Paper operates within a sector historically tied to natural resource extraction and processing in the Pacific Northwest. The company's decision to reduce its Lewiston workforce by 250 workers suggests either facility rationalization, productivity improvements through automation, or response to declining demand for paper products—market forces that have pressured the paper manufacturing sector across North America for two decades.
The significance of Clearwater Paper to Lewiston extends beyond the raw number of affected workers. Manufacturing positions typically offer above-median wages and benefits relative to service sector employment, meaning the loss of 250 manufacturing jobs represents not merely a headcount reduction but a meaningful erosion of middle-class earning capacity in the local economy. These positions likely supported households, mortgages, and consumer spending that sustained other local businesses.
The industry breakdown reveals stark concentration risk. Manufacturing accounts for 250 of 272 job losses (91.9 percent), while retail and food service combined account for only 22 positions. This distribution exposes a critical structural vulnerability in Lewiston's economic base: overwhelming dependence on a single industrial sector, represented primarily by a single employer.
The remaining two WARN notices—DCS Facility Services - WinCo Foods #128 and WinCo Foods—affected just 11 workers each and represent the retail/food service sector. While these layoffs are considerably smaller, they suggest broader pressure in retail employment, a sector facing nationwide secular decline driven by e-commerce competition and automation.
This industrial profile indicates that Lewiston has not diversified its employment base sufficiently to absorb shocks in any single sector. A robust local economy would distribute employment across multiple industries, including professional services, healthcare, technology, and advanced manufacturing. The current composition, heavily weighted toward paper manufacturing, leaves the city vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations, shifts in consumer packaging preferences, and industry-wide capacity consolidation.
The timeline of WARN notices reveals a specific pattern rather than a linear trend. One notice in 2011 suggests baseline economic stress in the immediate post-recession period, when many industrial employers were still adjusting to the 2008 financial crisis. The 2011 layoff likely reflected deferred workforce adjustments from the recession itself.
The 2016 notices—representing both the Clearwater Paper displacement and the WinCo Foods adjustments—suggest a second wave of disruption approximately five years into the recovery period. This temporal clustering warrants investigation into whether external market conditions (paper prices, retail consolidation) or internal corporate decisions (facility optimization, organizational restructuring) drove these simultaneous workforce reductions.
Importantly, the absence of WARN notices since 2016 suggests either stabilization in Lewiston's major employers or adoption of smaller-scale workforce adjustments that fall below WARN notice thresholds. This gap does not necessarily indicate economic health, as it could reflect earlier-stage decline masked by attrition or reduced hiring rather than overt layoffs.
For a city of Lewiston's size, the loss of 272 jobs over five years creates measurable economic friction. The median household income effects extend beyond the directly affected workers to secondary impacts on local retail spending, tax revenue, and housing demand. A worker earning $45,000 annually in manufacturing who enters unemployment or underemployment immediately reduces spending in local grocery stores, restaurants, and service businesses by approximately $3,000 to $4,000 annually.
Aggregate impact suggests the 250 Clearwater Paper workers lost approximated $11 to $12.5 million in annual earning capacity. Even if affected workers found replacement employment relatively quickly, wage replacement typically occurs at 75 to 85 percent of prior earnings, particularly when transitioning from manufacturing to service sector employment. This earnings reduction persists indefinitely, not merely during the unemployment period.
The psychological and social costs deserve equal analytical weight. Manufacturing employment in resource-dependent communities like Lewiston carries cultural significance beyond wages—these jobs represent stable, multi-generational employment pathways that historically required only high school completion. Their displacement disrupts occupational trajectories and community identity, particularly when replacement employment centers on lower-wage service work requiring different skill sets.
Lewiston's manufacturing-dependent profile reflects broader patterns in central Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. However, comparable regional cities have pursued more aggressive economic diversification. Boise, Idaho's capital and primary metropolitan center, has successfully attracted technology companies and healthcare operations that have diluted dependence on traditional extractive and manufacturing industries. Spokane, Washington similarly developed professional services and healthcare clusters.
Lewiston's three WARN notices over fifteen years position the city as experiencing moderate workforce instability relative to rural Idaho communities that lack major employers entirely, but below the diversified stability of larger regional centers. The city's economic trajectory depends substantially on whether Clearwater Paper maintains current employment levels and whether local economic development efforts successfully attract employers in growth sectors.
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