WARN Act Layoffs in Shreveport, Louisiana

Analysis: Layoffs in Shreveport, Louisiana

# Economic Analysis of Layoffs in Shreveport, Louisiana

The Magnitude of Workforce Displacement

Shreveport has experienced significant labor market disruption over the past two decades, with 47 WARN Act notices documenting the displacement of 6,685 workers. To contextualize this figure, Shreveport's metropolitan area labor force hovers around 200,000 workers, making these documented layoffs equivalent to roughly 3.3 percent of the regional workforce. While this percentage may appear modest in isolation, the concentration of job losses within specific industries and among major employers reveals a labor market characterized by structural vulnerability rather than diffuse adjustment.

The true economic impact extends beyond the raw headcount. The WARN Act threshold of 50 or more workers at a single site means that smaller layoffs—particularly those affecting specialized skilled trades—remain unrecorded in this data. Additionally, the 47 notices represent only formal, advance-warning layoffs at firms meeting statutory thresholds. Sudden closures, attrition-based workforce reductions, and indirect supply chain employment losses compound the documented displacement.

Dominant Employers and Manufacturing Concentration

The layoff landscape in Shreveport is dominated by manufacturing firms, with General Motors and Libbey Inc accounting for 1,753 of the 6,685 documented job losses (26 percent of total displacement). General Motors filed two WARN notices affecting 964 workers, reflecting the automotive sector's persistent restructuring. Libbey Inc, a glass container manufacturer, filed three separate notices displacing 959 workers combined, signaling both chronic overcapacity in the container industry and Shreveport's vulnerability as a single-industry dependent location.

Printpack, another manufacturing employer, issued three notices affecting 120 workers. The pattern across these notices—multiple filings from the same employer rather than single mass events—suggests ongoing facility optimization and production line consolidation rather than sudden catastrophic closures. This pattern is economically significant because it indicates structural rather than cyclical displacement, meaning affected workers face more persistent reemployment challenges.

Beyond manufacturing, several large employers from different sectors registered significant layoffs. Sam's Town Hotel & Casino displaced 414 workers in a single notice, representing the largest single-employer event in the dataset. The hospitality sector's representation across two WARN notices affecting 614 workers reflects the industry's inherent volatility and sensitivity to regional tourism demand. Verizon Wireless filed one notice affecting 312 workers, part of the broader telecommunications industry's decades-long transition toward automation and consolidation.

Healthcare and institutional services employers also appear prominently. ABM Healthcare Support Services Inc filed two notices affecting 379 workers, while Christus Schumpert Medical Center displaced 200 workers. These notices are particularly significant for a region where healthcare often functions as a stable employment anchor; workforce reductions in this sector suggest outsourcing of support services rather than facility consolidation.

Industry Patterns and Structural Decline

Manufacturing dominates the layoff landscape overwhelmingly, accounting for 17 of 47 notices and displacing 2,834 workers—42 percent of all documented losses. This concentration reveals Shreveport's continued dependence on legacy industrial sectors experiencing persistent secular decline. The manufacturing notices encompass traditional heavy industries vulnerable to automation, offshoring, and overcapacity: glass containers, automotive components, steel fabrication, and packaging materials.

The second-largest source of displacement is the mining and energy sector, with five notices affecting 680 workers. This concentration reflects Louisiana's broader economic reliance on oil and gas extraction and refining, industries subject to volatile commodity cycles. BJ Services, an oilfield services company, filed one notice displacing 273 workers, a direct indicator of energy sector cyclicality. The timing of these notices—with notable clustering in 2008, 2009, and 2020—correlates with oil price collapses in those periods, demonstrating how global commodity markets drive local employment volatility.

Transportation and logistics generated five notices affecting 479 workers, anchored by ExpressJet Airlines, which filed two notices displacing 286 workers. The airline industry's structural exposure to demand shocks became dramatically evident in 2020, when pandemic-driven aviation collapse triggered the highest concentration of WARN notices in any single year.

Information technology and telecommunications appear less frequently—two notices affecting 366 workers—but their presence reflects broader industry trends toward automation and concentration of operations in major metropolitan hubs. The absence of substantial retail sector displacement (only one notice affecting two workers) is notable and likely reflects the timing of big-box retail consolidation relative to the WARN database's coverage period.

Temporal Patterns and Economic Cycle Effects

The chronological distribution of WARN notices reveals three distinct periods of elevated displacement. The 2007-2009 period, encompassing the financial crisis, generated ten notices displacing an unknown but substantial number of workers. The notices filed in 2008 and 2009 reflected manufacturing and energy sector contractions, with the severity peaking during 2008's automotive industry collapse.

A second surge occurred in 2020, when seven notices were filed—the highest annual total in the dataset. This clustering directly corresponds to the pandemic's economic disruption, with ExpressJet Airlines and hospitality sector employers filing during the spring and summer of 2020 when travel demand collapsed. The 2020 spike demonstrates how macroeconomic shocks propagate rapidly through Shreveport's economy.

The most recent period, 2023-2025, shows four notices in 2023 followed by two each in 2024 and 2025. The recency of these filings prevents definitive assessment, but the sustained level suggests either ongoing cyclical weakness or continued structural adjustment in manufacturing and energy sectors.

Between major crisis periods—2010-2019—the notice rate stabilized at roughly two to four per year, indicating a baseline level of normal industrial restructuring rather than crisis-driven displacement. The relative stability outside crisis periods suggests that Shreveport's economy, while dependent on vulnerable sectors, does not experience consistent deterioration between cyclical shocks.

Economic Implications for Shreveport's Labor Market

The concentration of job losses in manufacturing and energy presents acute challenges for workforce adaptation. These industries historically offered middle-class wages to workers without college degrees; manufacturing jobs in particular provided pathways to homeownership and stable family income. Displacement from these sectors typically forces workers into lower-wage service employment, early retirement with inadequate savings, or outmigration to regions with stronger labor demand.

The geographic concentration of displacement matters critically. Shreveport lacks the economic diversification of larger Louisiana metros like New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The absence of substantial professional services, technology, or advanced manufacturing clusters means that displaced manufacturing workers face limited options for comparable-wage reemployment within the region. Workers displaced from General Motors, Libbey, or Benteler Steel/Tube Manufacturing cannot easily transition into similarly-compensated roles in Shreveport's economy.

Healthcare sector layoffs at Christus Schumpert and ABM Healthcare Support Services merit particular attention because they erode what has historically been healthcare's role as a recession-resistant employment base. Support service outsourcing, particularly evident in the ABM Healthcare notices, represents cost-cutting that shifts employment from permanent institutional roles to contractor positions typically offering lower wages and reduced benefits.

The cumulative effect of 6,685 documented displacements, spread across multiple years but concentrated in specific sectors, creates structural headwinds for wage growth and household formation in Shreveport. Each layoff cycle removes workers with specific skills from the labor pool—either through permanent outmigration or permanent exit from the workforce—making subsequent recovery more difficult.

Regional Context and Louisiana Comparisons

Shreveport's layoff experience reflects broader Louisiana economic vulnerabilities. The state's economy remains disproportionately dependent on energy extraction and petrochemicals, sectors subject to global commodity price volatility. The representation of five WARN notices from mining and energy employers in a 47-notice total (10.6 percent) is substantially higher than in more diversified states, indicating Louisiana's persistent structural exposure to energy price cycles.

Manufacturing concentration in Shreveport exceeds that of most comparable mid-sized metros. While the Big Three automakers maintain substantial operations throughout the Southeast, Shreveport lacks the regional supply chain diversity found in cities like Nashville, Memphis, or Huntsville. The repeated notices from Libbey Inc reflect not merely company-specific problems but the broader decline of container manufacturing as plastics and other materials substitute for glass.

Compared to Louisiana's more prosperous regions, Shreveport's inability to diversify beyond manufacturing and energy represents a significant competitive disadvantage. While New Orleans has built tourism and professional services capacity, and Baton Rouge hosts a substantial petrochemical corridor with associated technical employment, Shreveport remains primarily dependent on facilities-based manufacturing vulnerable to automation and consolidation.

The absence of major technology sector employers in Shreveport's WARN notice history—beyond the modest presence of Verizon Wireless—indicates the city's limited penetration of the economy's fastest-growing sectors. This absence is not coincidental but reflects decades of underinvestment in workforce education, broadband infrastructure, and quality-of-life factors that attract technology employers.

The data ultimately documents a regional economy caught between post-industrial decline and unsuccessful economic diversification. Shreveport's workforce has absorbed the displacement from legacy manufacturing and energy sectors without successfully attracting sufficient employment in higher-wage sectors to offset losses. The persistence of these challenges across multiple economic cycles and technological eras suggests that structural adaptation remains incomplete.