WARN Act mass layoff and plant closure notices in Morton Grove, Illinois, updated daily.
| Company | City | Employees | Notice Date | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Morton Grove | 179 | 2026-01-28 | |
| Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals, Inc | Morton Grove | 66 | 2022-07-19 | Closure |
| Catering by Michael's, Inc | Morton Grove | 162 | 2020-09-14 | Layoff |
| Scoobeez, Inc | Morton Grove | 41 | 2020-08-31 | Closure |
| Land of Nod | Morton Grove | 25 | 2017-10-27 |
# Economic Analysis: Layoffs in Morton Grove, Illinois
Morton Grove has experienced 5 WARN Act notices affecting 473 workers across a roughly nine-year period from 2017 through 2026. While this figure may appear modest compared to larger Illinois municipalities, the concentration of layoffs among a handful of major employers and the episodic nature of these reductions reveal significant vulnerabilities in the village's economic base.
These 473 displaced workers represent a substantial shock to a community of Morton Grove's size. With an estimated population around 23,000, the workforce affected by WARN notices constitutes roughly 2 percent of the total resident population—a meaningful disruption to household stability, consumer spending, and municipal tax revenues. The distributed timing of these notices across multiple years suggests that Morton Grove faces not a single economic crisis but rather a pattern of recurring sectoral instability that has touched different industries at different moments.
The layoff landscape in Morton Grove is dominated by a single employer: Amazon, which filed one WARN notice affecting 179 workers. This single notice represents 37.8 percent of all workers affected by layoffs over the entire nine-year period. Such concentration indicates that Morton Grove's economic resilience depends heavily on the stability of a single logistics or distribution operation, a dependency that carries inherent risk.
Catering by Michael's, Inc. represents the second-largest disruption, affecting 162 workers through one WARN notice—34.3 percent of total layoffs. This is a substantial event for a single employer in a suburban context and signals volatility in the food service and catering sector. Unlike Amazon's logistics operation, which may serve a regional or national distribution network, a catering company's workforce reduction likely reflects either contraction of local demand or a significant operational restructuring.
The remaining three employers—Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (66 workers), Scoobeez, Inc. (41 workers), and Land of Nod (25 workers)—each filed a single WARN notice and collectively account for 27.9 percent of affected workers. This secondary tier of employers spans manufacturing, transportation, and retail, indicating that layoff risk is genuinely distributed across multiple sectors rather than concentrated in one industry.
Three distinct industries appear in Morton Grove's WARN notice data: Accommodation & Food Services, Manufacturing, and Transportation. The Accommodation & Food Services sector dominates by worker count, with Catering by Michael's, Inc. accounting for 162 affected workers from a single WARN notice. This sector's prominence in Morton Grove's layoff profile reflects broader national trends in food service volatility, where establishments frequently restructure, consolidate, or relocate operations based on contract losses or demand fluctuations.
Manufacturing activity in Morton Grove, represented by Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals, Inc., affected 66 workers. The pharmaceutical manufacturing sector faces continuous pressures from supply chain optimization, automation, and geographic consolidation of production facilities. A single WARN notice from a pharmaceutical manufacturer suggests either a facility closure or substantial downsizing, which may reflect the industry-wide trend toward centralizing production in fewer, larger facilities with advanced automation.
Transportation, through Scoobeez, Inc., affected 41 workers. The limited data on this employer prevents detailed analysis, but the layoff occurred in an industry experiencing significant technological disruption from automation and shifting logistics models. Amazon's 179-worker reduction, while classified in e-commerce rather than transportation, likely involves logistics and distribution operations that compete directly with traditional transportation and warehouse employment.
Notably absent from Morton Grove's WARN data are notices from professional services, healthcare, education, or technology sectors—industries that anchor many Illinois suburban economies. This gap suggests that Morton Grove may lack significant presence in higher-wage, more stable sectors that typically weather economic downturns better than goods-producing and service industries.
The distribution of WARN notices across time reveals an episodic pattern rather than a sustained declining trend. The village experienced one notice in 2017, two notices in 2020, one in 2022, and one projected for 2026. The concentration in 2020—a year when the COVID-19 pandemic triggered widespread economic disruption—is expected; two of the five notices correspond to pandemic-era volatility. This timing suggests that some of Morton Grove's employment instability stems from external macroeconomic shocks rather than purely local factors.
The spacing of notices across nine years, with gaps of multiple years between events, indicates that no single year has been overwhelmed by layoff activity. However, the projected 2026 notice suggests that economic uncertainty persists. The historical pattern does not show acceleration or deceleration clearly; instead, it demonstrates that major employers in Morton Grove periodically restructure their operations, each time displacing a meaningful segment of the local workforce.
For Morton Grove households, 473 WARN-eligible layoffs represent serious disruption to family finances, health insurance coverage, and consumer spending power. WARN Act notices only capture formal notices for layoffs of 50 or more workers at a single site; smaller reductions go unrecorded, so actual layoff activity likely exceeds the reported figure.
The loss of 179 jobs at Amazon and 162 jobs at Catering by Michael's, Inc. individually represent major employment shocks for a suburb of Morton Grove's size. Both events eliminate entry and mid-level positions that likely paid workers between $15 and $25 per hour—wages that sustain working-class households in the Chicago metropolitan area. The concentration of losses among food service and logistics employers suggests that Morton Grove's employment base skews toward lower-wage, higher-turnover positions rather than stable, higher-paying roles.
Municipal tax revenue consequences warrant consideration. Illinois municipalities depend substantially on sales tax, property tax, and other local revenues. A 473-worker displacement reduces consumer spending and may suppress property values in surrounding neighborhoods, creating headwinds for municipal finances in the medium term.
Illinois overall has experienced significant WARN notice activity, particularly during 2020 and in manufacturing-heavy regions of central and southern Illinois. Morton Grove's experience—5 notices over nine years affecting 473 workers—reflects not the severe, chronic deindustrialization that has affected manufacturing-dependent areas, but rather the episodic churn characteristic of suburban service and logistics hubs.
The village's layoff profile differs from manufacturing-intensive Illinois communities that have endured sustained job losses. However, it reflects the vulnerability of suburban economies increasingly dependent on logistics, e-commerce distribution, and contract food service—sectors characterized by thinner margins, higher competitive pressure, and greater susceptibility to operational restructuring than the stable, union-protected manufacturing employment that historically anchored Illinois suburbs.
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