WARN Act Layoffs in Warsaw, Indiana

Analysis: Layoffs in Warsaw, Indiana

# Economic Analysis: The Layoff Landscape in Warsaw, Indiana

Overview: Scale and Significance of Workforce Disruption

Warsaw, Indiana has experienced substantial workforce disruption over the past decade, with nine Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act filings affecting 2,362 workers since 2013. To contextualize this impact, Warsaw's total population stands at approximately 13,500 residents, meaning these layoffs have affected roughly 17.5 percent of the entire city's population—a staggering concentration of economic displacement for a community of this size.

The scale of individual layoff events in Warsaw is particularly notable. The two largest employers filing WARN notices—LSC Communications Print Solutions and LSC Communications US, LLC, both subsidiaries of the same parent company—collectively laid off 1,050 workers across two separate filings. This represents 44.5 percent of all workers affected by WARN notices in Warsaw over the study period. A single company's workforce reduction of this magnitude in a small Indiana city creates cascading effects throughout the local economy, disrupting household income, consumer spending, and municipal tax revenues simultaneously.

The telecommunications sector has also proven volatile in Warsaw, with KGP Telecommunications, LLC filing two separate WARN notices affecting 489 workers combined. These dual filings suggest not a one-time reorganization but ongoing contraction within the company's Warsaw operations, indicating structural challenges rather than cyclical adjustment.

The Dominant Players: Company-Specific Dynamics

KGP Telecommunications, LLC emerges as the most frequent filer in Warsaw's WARN notice record, with two notices spanning multiple years. The company's decision to file twice—rather than consolidating layoffs into a single notice—suggests either staggered operational closures or successive strategic pivots that required multiple workforce adjustments. Telecommunications remains a highly competitive, rapidly consolidating industry where technological disruption and market consolidation drive repeated workforce reductions. Warsaw's position as a telecommunications hub has become a liability rather than an asset, as competition from larger regional centers and digital transformation eliminate jobs faster than the local market can absorb displaced workers.

The LSC Communications filings represent a particularly acute disruption. LSC Communications is a national printing and publishing services company that has confronted existential headwinds from digital media adoption and e-commerce disruption of traditional print channels. The company's two nearly identical WARN filings—both listing 525 workers affected—suggest that Warsaw hosted a significant printing or logistics facility that the company systematically dismantled. The fact that two separate legal entities filed independent notices, despite affecting identical worker counts, indicates either a complex corporate restructuring or deliberate separation of liabilities and assets.

Kosciusko Community YMCA, with a WARN notice affecting 300 workers, represents an unexpected entrant into the layoff landscape. As a nonprofit community organization, YMCA layoffs typically reflect funding crises, membership collapse, or operational consolidation rather than market competition. The scale—300 workers from a single facility in a city of 13,500—suggests this YMCA was a major regional employer, not merely a local fitness center. This filing points to broader challenges in nonprofit fundraising and philanthropic support during specific economic periods.

Dalton Corporation affected 257 workers through a single WARN filing, representing 10.9 percent of all layoffs in Warsaw. PolyOne Designed Structures and Solutions and Winona PVD Coatings LLC affected 110 and 108 workers respectively, indicating mid-sized manufacturing operations subject to market volatility. Wildman Business Group, with 48 affected workers, represents the smallest major employer filing in Warsaw's WARN record.

Industry Patterns: Manufacturing's Limited Footprint

The industry breakdown in Warsaw's WARN notice data reveals a surprisingly narrow manufacturing presence. Only one WARN notice explicitly categorized as manufacturing appears in the dataset—Dalton Corporation's filing affecting 257 workers. This represents just 10.9 percent of all workers affected by WARN notices in Warsaw, a strikingly low proportion for a Midwestern Indiana city.

This data underrepresents Warsaw's actual manufacturing sector, however. Several companies in the layoff record—PolyOne Designed Structures and Solutions, Winona PVD Coatings LLC, and potentially others—operate in manufacturing despite not being explicitly categorized as such in the available industry classifications. Coating and plastics operations are unambiguously manufacturing activities, yet they appear outside the formal manufacturing category, suggesting either incomplete data classification or a broader economic transition already underway in Warsaw.

The dominance of telecommunications and printing services in Warsaw's layoff record indicates that the city's economic base has already shifted substantially away from traditional manufacturing toward business services. This transition has left Warsaw vulnerable to digital disruption in ways that would affect pure manufacturing less severely. Print media and telecommunications infrastructure represent sectors where demand destruction—not merely cyclical contraction—has fundamentally reduced market size.

Historical Trends: Volatility Without Recovery

Examining the temporal distribution of WARN notices reveals an uneven but persistently troubling pattern. A single notice appeared in 2013, followed by a two-year gap, then two notices in 2019. The clustering of notices in 2020 and 2023 suggests economic stress points corresponding to broader macroeconomic disruptions, most notably the pandemic recession of 2020 and the post-pandemic economic adjustment of 2023.

The most recent notice in 2025 indicates that Warsaw's layoff activity has not abated. Rather than stabilizing post-pandemic, the city continues experiencing workforce disruptions. The absence of any meaningful recovery period between layoff clusters—no extended span without notices—suggests Warsaw lacks sufficient economic momentum to absorb and redeploy displaced workers into stable, new employment.

The ten-year span covered by this data reveals no consistent recovery trajectory. If Warsaw's economy were adapting successfully to sectoral shifts, one would expect early layoffs followed by declining frequency as industries consolidated and stabilized. Instead, the persistence of notices through 2025 indicates ongoing structural adjustment without successful transition.

Local Economic Impact: Community-Scale Disruption

A city of 13,500 residents cannot absorb 2,362 job losses distributed across nine separate employer actions without profound consequences. The concentration of layoffs in a handful of major employers creates particular vulnerability: when LSC Communications eliminated over 1,000 jobs, no diversified local economy could offset that magnitude of income loss.

The loss of 300 YMCA positions specifically damages Warsaw's quality-of-life infrastructure. Community recreation facilities are not luxury amenities but essential services that support public health, youth development, and social cohesion. Their contraction signals either declining municipal resources for community services or reduced household discretionary spending that supports philanthropic giving.

The repeated layoffs by KGP Telecommunications suggest that whatever competitive advantage Warsaw once possessed in telecommunications has eroded. This sector once represented stable, higher-wage employment—the type of jobs that anchor middle-class stability in small cities. Their loss creates a downstream cascade: reduced consumer demand from unemployed workers, declining commercial real estate values, reduced municipal tax revenues, and deteriorating public services that further degrade the city's economic competitiveness.

Manufacturing job losses, despite their relatively small representation in WARN filings, carry disproportionate weight in small-city economies because manufacturing jobs typically offer union wages, benefits, and pathways to middle-class stability without requiring college credentials. The loss of even 257 Dalton Corporation positions represents the elimination of potential middle-class employment for workers without university degrees.

Workforce and Regional Positioning

Warsaw's WARN notice history must be understood within Indiana's broader economic context. Indiana remains one of the nation's most manufacturing-dependent states, yet even traditional Midwestern manufacturing centers face structural headwinds from automation, global competition, and supply chain reorganization. Warsaw, positioned in Kosciusko County in north-central Indiana, sits outside the major metropolitan corridors of Indianapolis, Chicago, and Cincinnati—the regional centers that continue attracting new business investment and educated workers.

The state has aggressively pursued recruitment of high-tech manufacturing and advanced logistics facilities, investments that disproportionately benefit large metropolitan areas with existing infrastructure, educational institutions, and skilled labor pools. Warsaw, lacking these assets, has watched employers depart without attracting equivalent replacements. The telecommunications presence that once distinguished Warsaw economically has fragmented into smaller, more precarious positions within consolidated national corporations vulnerable to periodic restructuring.

The pattern of WARN notices in Warsaw reflects not merely local mismanagement but structural regional disadvantage. Small cities in the Midwest increasingly struggle to retain employers in sectors experiencing technological disruption and consolidation. Without active, well-funded economic development strategies targeting emerging sectors aligned with available workforce skills and infrastructure, cities like Warsaw face continued volatility and decline in employment opportunities.