WARN Act mass layoff and plant closure notices in Chicago, Illinois, updated daily.
# Chicago's Evolving Layoff Landscape: A Deep Dive into Workforce Disruption
Chicago has experienced a dramatic escalation in workforce displacement over the past five years, with WARN notice data revealing a city grappling with accelerating structural economic changes. Across 337 WARN notices filed since 2015, approximately 54,694 workers have been affected by mass layoffs—a staggering figure that understates the true economic ripple effects when accounting for family dependents, community tax bases, and consumer spending losses.
The concentration of displacement reveals itself most acutely in recent years. The period from 2015 through 2019 averaged just 12 notices annually, affecting a modest baseline of workforce disruption. Then came 2020, when COVID-19 triggered a seismic shift: 124 notices filed in a single year, signaling the pandemic's devastating impact on Chicago's economy. While 2021 returned to more historical levels with 15 notices, the subsequent years tell a different story. From 2023 through 2025, Chicago has averaged 40.67 notices annually—a sustained elevation that suggests structural rather than cyclical pressures are reshaping the city's employment landscape.
The 47 notices filed in 2025 alone already represent an extraordinarily active pace, suggesting the current year will finish as one of the most disruptive on record. This trajectory indicates that Chicago's layoff crisis is not a temporary phenomenon tied to pandemic recovery but rather reflects fundamental shifts in industrial composition, technological disruption, and corporate consolidation patterns.
Treasure Island Foods, Inc. emerges as the leading filer of WARN notices in Chicago with six separate notices affecting 454 workers. This Chicago-based grocery chain's repeated filings suggest ongoing store closures or consolidations rather than a single catastrophic event—a pattern consistent with broader retail sector contraction driven by e-commerce competition and shifting consumer purchasing behaviors.
Walmart, America's largest private employer, has filed four separate notices displacing 764 workers across the city. For a retailer of Walmart's scale, multiple WARN filings typically signal store closure consolidations or distribution center automation investments. The company's presence among Chicago's top layoff employers reflects the ongoing hollowing out of traditional retail employment in urban centers.
The data reveals a critical finding regarding transportation and logistics: United Airlines, Inc. ranks third with three notices affecting 4,915 workers—the single largest displacement from any employer. This concentration reflects both airline industry volatility and Chicago's status as a major aviation hub serving two major airports. United's significant layoffs likely stem from fleet restructuring, route optimization, or automation of ground handling functions. Similarly, Swissport Fueling, a major airport service provider, filed two notices affecting 2,089 workers, underscoring how airline and airport operations generate cascading employment disruptions throughout supporting service industries.
Inter-Con Security Systems, Inc. filed two notices affecting 1,396 workers, reflecting a fundamental shift in security services—likely toward more technology-driven, fewer-employee models. TransUnion, a Chicago-based credit reporting and information services company, filed two notices affecting 979 workers, suggesting corporate consolidation, automation of analytical functions, or offshore transition of knowledge work.
The presence of Sodexo (3 notices, 513 workers), Compass Group (2 notices, 333 workers), and other food service operators reflects the accommodation and food service sector's crisis, while GardaWorld Federal Services (3 notices, 183 workers) indicates pressure on contract security and government services staffing. Notably absent from the top filers are the major financial services and technology companies that dominate employment in other major metropolitan areas, suggesting Chicago's financial sector remains relatively stable even as other sectors experience significant disruption.
The industry breakdown reveals a city economy fundamentally transformed by forces reshaping American employment. The accommodation and food services sector dominates the WARN notice landscape with 99 notices affecting 12,357 workers—nearly 23 percent of all displaced workers. This concentration reflects the cascading impact of pandemic-driven hospitality collapse, recovery complications, and persistent structural headwinds. Chicago's tourism industry never fully recovered to pre-pandemic employment levels, and ongoing consolidations among hotel operators and restaurant groups continue generating workforce displacement.
Transportation represents the second-largest concentration with 19 notices affecting 9,833 workers—slightly less than 18 percent of total displacement. This includes not merely airline operations but also freight, logistics, and ground transportation. Chicago's position as a continental logistics hub means that transportation sector volatility generates particularly severe local impacts, as supply chain restructuring and automation investments ripple through warehousing, distribution, and ground handling operations.
Manufacturing, long considered the backbone of Chicago's industrial economy, shows 29 notices affecting 3,685 workers. While manufacturing represents only about 6.7 percent of displaced workers by count, the severity of these displacements—often involving complete facility closures—means their community impact far exceeds the numerical representation. Mauser Packaging Solutions (3 notices, 454 workers), Wheatland Tube, LLC (2 notices, 476 workers), and RR Donnelley (2 notices, 283 workers) exemplify how manufacturing consolidation, automation investment, and offshore production have hollowed out manufacturing employment in the Chicago region.
Healthcare shows 22 notices affecting 3,743 workers, reflecting hospital consolidations, administrative streamlining following pandemic surges, and ongoing automation of clinical support functions. Retail accounts for 14 notices affecting 2,225 workers—a deceptively modest-sounding figure that masks the accelerating extinction of traditional retail employment across Chicago's commercial corridors.
Administrative and support services (12 notices, 2,947 workers) reflect corporate back-office consolidations and automation. Information and technology companies, despite their outsized economic significance nationally, account for only 11 notices affecting 1,204 workers—a surprisingly modest figure that may reflect either relative sector stability or that major tech companies execute layoffs more quietly, sometimes without WARN notice requirements.
The year-by-year progression illuminates how Chicago's economy has transformed. The 2015-2019 pre-pandemic baseline of approximately 60 notices across five years reflected a relatively steady-state labor market with routine corporate restructuring. The 2020 explosion to 124 notices was obviously pandemic-driven, but the critical inflection point emerges in 2023, when notices more than doubled from 2022's 16 to 39. This 2023 acceleration has persisted and accelerated further into 2025's 47 notices.
This trajectory suggests something more fundamental than pandemic recovery. The rising baseline indicates that Chicago's economic structure is undergoing sustained transformation. The progression from cyclical to structural displacement manifests in the continued elevation of notices even as the broader economy showed signs of improvement. Unlike the 2020 spike followed by recovery, the 2023-2025 elevation suggests permanent reallocation of capital investment and employment away from traditional Chicago sectors.
The data also reveals temporal clustering within certain sectors. The accommodation and food services dominance in 2020-2021 (pandemic driven) differs markedly from the transportation sector concentration in the 2024-2025 period, suggesting different industries face different crisis timelines. Manufacturing layoffs appear distributed across the entire period, indicating ongoing rather than episodic restructuring.
The displacement of 54,694 workers across 337 notices generates ripple effects far exceeding the individual job losses. Chicago's municipal tax base depends substantially on both corporate income and resident income taxes, creating a dual vulnerability: employers experiencing disruption often defer or reduce local tax payments, while displaced workers immediately reduce consumption and property tax collections.
The sectoral concentration matters enormously for neighborhood-level impacts. Hospitality and food service displacement concentrates in downtown Chicago and near major tourist attractions, disrupting communities already struggling with permanent job losses from decades of manufacturing decline. Transportation displacement impacts airport-adjacent neighborhoods and logistics corridors, often lower-income communities with limited alternative employment opportunities. Manufacturing displacement affects older industrial neighborhoods where manufacturing employment remained concentrated.
The presence of firms like TransUnion, a major Chicago employer, among top layoff filers raises particular concerns. When headquarters-based companies execute significant layoffs, the impact extends beyond direct employment loss to management, legal, accounting, and business services firms dependent on that client base. A single major corporate headquarters reduction can cascade through entire sectors of business services employment.
The modest representation of information and technology sector layoffs (11 notices, 1,204 workers) may reflect either that Chicago attracted relatively less venture-backed technology employment than peer cities like San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle, or that technology firms use different employment structures that may not trigger WARN notices. This represents a strategic vulnerability: if Chicago lacks a deep technology sector immune to traditional layoff cycles, the city's future growth trajectory may face constraints.
Chicago's 337 notices and 54,694 affected workers represent the overwhelming majority of Illinois-wide WARN activity. As the state's dominant economic engine, Chicago's displacement patterns effectively establish statewide trends. The concentration of major employers in Chicago means that layoffs affecting national corporations headquartered in the city have disproportionate impact on Illinois unemployment rates, state revenue collections, and regional economic growth.
Notably absent from the data are significant layoffs in downstate Illinois manufacturing or agricultural-related industries, suggesting the WARN notice dataset captures primarily metropolitan job losses. This raises a secondary concern: rural Illinois communities have experienced decades of manufacturing and agricultural employment decline, and to the extent WARN notices cluster in Chicago, the data may understate cumulative long-term displacement across the broader state.
The concentration of transportation, logistics, and accommodation employment in Chicago—relative to downstate Illinois—means that sectoral crisis points like the hospitality collapse affect Chicago disproportionately. Conversely, if agricultural or downstate manufacturing experienced comparable percentage job losses without reaching WARN notice thresholds, the relative stability of downstate employment in the data may be illusory.
Chicago's role as a regional headquarters location means that corporate consolidation decisions made in Chicago offices generate layoff effects throughout Illinois and the broader Midwest. The presence of firms like Groupon (2 notices, 359 workers) among Chicago's significant layoff filers reflects how technology and services sector consolidations can quickly vaporize significant employment bases that seemed stable years earlier.
The 2025 trajectory of 47 notices already filed suggests Chicago's layoff pace will remain elevated through the remainder of the year, potentially exceeding even 2023's 39 notices. This sustained elevation, combined with sectoral concentration in hospitality, transportation, and manufacturing, indicates Chicago faces a multi-year period of labor market restructuring. The challenge for policymakers involves managing this transition while preserving the human and fiscal capital necessary for future growth.
Get Chicago Layoff Alerts
Free daily alerts for WARN Act filings in Illinois.
