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# New York's Layoff Landscape: A Comprehensive Economic Analysis
New York has experienced 8,423 WARN notices affecting 698,166 workers since 2006, making it one of the nation's most economically volatile states. However, this aggregate figure obscures a profoundly skewed distribution: a single catastrophic year — 2020 — accounted for 2,441 notices and 262,519 workers, representing 29% of all notices and 38% of all affected workers in the dataset. Excluding the pandemic-driven disruption, New York's layoff trajectory shows a state struggling with structural workforce challenges, concentrated employer vulnerability, and geographic inequality that extends well beyond temporary cyclical downturns.
The current data through early 2025 suggests stabilization at historically low levels — just 42 notices affecting 1,500 workers in 2024 and 32 notices affecting 206 workers in 2025 — yet this apparent recovery obscures persistent vulnerabilities in manufacturing, hospitality, and financial services that periodically produce severe dislocations. New York's labor market remains shaped by legacy industries in decline, uneven geographic development between New York City and upstate regions, and dependence on major employers whose individual decisions can crater local economies.
The 2020 pandemic generated an extraordinary spike in WARN notices that fundamentally distorts the temporal analysis of New York's layoff patterns. That single year's 2,441 notices nearly equaled the entire 2006-2019 combined total of 3,913 notices. The 262,519 workers affected in 2020 alone exceeded the total affected in the preceding fourteen years (242,572 workers). This suggests that pandemic-induced disruptions were substantially more severe in New York than pre-existing structural vulnerabilities might predict.
Yet beneath this dramatic 2020 peak lies a more troubling baseline. The 2006-2019 period shows consistent annual layoff activity averaging 289 notices and 17,326 affected workers yearly — a steady-state that reflects ongoing sectoral decline and workforce restructuring. The post-2020 recovery has been incomplete: 2021 recorded 250 notices (close to but not quite returning to trend), while 2022 and 2023 fell below pre-pandemic levels at 165 and 172 notices respectively. This suggests not a return to normality but rather a state perpetually adjusting to multiple overlapping crises. The preliminary 2024-2025 data shows near-negligible notice activity, but this likely reflects either a reporting lag or a genuine transition toward workforce instability occurring below the WARN threshold.
New York's layoff patterns reveal an economy in structural transition, with four industries dominating the disruption landscape: Accommodation & Food, Manufacturing, Retail, and Healthcare collectively account for 3,418 notices and 329,686 workers — nearly half of all layoffs and 47% of all affected workers.
Accommodation & Food leads with 1,386 notices affecting 138,949 workers. This industry concentration reflects both the state's enormous tourism and hospitality footprint — particularly the New York City restaurant and hotel sectors — and these industries' extreme vulnerability to demand shocks. The 2020 pandemic delivered a near-total sector collapse, and the sustained elevation of accommodation layoffs through 2021-2023 suggests that industry consolidation and reduced capacity persisted even as pandemic restrictions lifted. This points to structural oversupply in hotel beds and restaurant seats coupled with persistent consumer preference shifts toward smaller establishments and away from traditional fine dining.
Manufacturing shows the second-largest impact with 814 notices and 61,784 workers, but this figure masks acute geographic concentration. Eastman Kodak Company alone filed 286 notices affecting 2,836 workers across multiple facilities in Rochester — including locations at Kodak Office, Company Office, Eastman Park, Kodak Research Labs, and Eastman Business Park. Kodak's sustained layoff notices span the entire dataset period, reflecting the company's multi-decade decline from dominant imaging corporation to niche player in a digital-first economy. The company's persistence in generating WARN notices despite its diminished scale suggests not temporary cyclical downturns but permanent restructuring of its New York manufacturing footprint.
Retail generated 723 notices and 74,367 workers in layoffs, concentrated among legacy department store and electronics chains experiencing demand migration to e-commerce. Circuit City Stores, Inc. filed 23 notices affecting 1,428 workers during its 2009 bankruptcy and liquidation. Sears generated 12 notices affecting 589 workers across its decline. These figures document the wholesale destruction of physical retail employment across upstate and suburban New York as online commerce redistribution accelerated.
Healthcare, despite being a growth sector nationally, generated 495 notices affecting 58,587 workers. Within this, Visiting Nurse Service of New York Home Care filed 24 notices affecting 634 workers, suggesting consolidation and efficiency drives within healthcare delivery organizations. The presence of significant healthcare layoffs in an ostensibly growing industry indicates that institutional restructuring — mergers, consolidations, and shifts toward lower-labor-intensity delivery models — is outpacing demand growth in some segments.
Finance & Insurance produced 514 notices affecting 34,233 workers, with contributions from Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (15 notices, 2,945 workers), Goldman, Sachs & Co (13 notices, 1,737 workers), and Sterling National Bank (51 notices, 261 workers). These notices indicate that financial services — historically New York's employment engine and GDP driver — experienced significant consolidation. The 2008-2009 financial crisis generated substantial notices in this category, but persistent layoffs through the 2010s suggest structural overcapacity in legacy banking and securities operations, particularly as digital fintech competitors eroded market share.
The geographic distribution of layoffs reveals extreme concentration in New York City paired with serious vulnerability in upstate manufacturing regions. New York City (the borough simply designated "New York" in the dataset) accounts for 2,512 notices and 252,910 workers — representing 30% of all notices and 36% of all workers. When combined with Brooklyn (461 notices, 45,905 workers), the city proper accounts for 2,973 notices and 298,815 workers — or 35% of all notices and 43% of all affected workers.
This concentration reflects both New York City's status as a massive employment center and its vulnerability to sector-specific shocks. The accommodation and food layoffs are heavily concentrated in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where hotels and restaurants sustained catastrophic 2020 closures. Financial services layoffs cluster in Lower Manhattan and the financial district, reflecting the sector's downtown concentration.
However, upstate regions show equally severe but structurally different challenges. Rochester recorded 457 notices affecting 20,331 workers, creating a layoff-to-city-size ratio far exceeding New York City's. Rochester's layoffs are dominated by Kodak's ongoing restructuring — removing the company's distortions reveals that Rochester faced the loss of one of its two or three largest employers over multiple decades. Buffalo (132 notices, 13,014 workers) similarly shows manufacturing and heavy industry decline, with no single dominant employer but rather the accumulated effect of automotive supply, steel processing, and industrial equipment manufacturing's contraction.
This geographic pattern creates vastly different policy challenges. New York City's layoffs, while large in absolute numbers, occur in a diversified economy where alternative employment opportunities exist across sectors and geographies. Rochester and Buffalo face more serious labor market restructuring because alternative employment is scarcer and workers cannot easily relocate within a reasonable commute. The concentration of major employer WARN notices in Rochester — where Kodak's multiple facilities dominate the top-10 employers list — means that individual corporate decisions disproportionately shape entire regional economies.
New York's layoff pattern demonstrates extraordinary concentration among a small number of employers. The top ten employers filing WARN notices account for 413 notices and 6,365 workers — but this dramatically understates Kodak's dominance once duplicate entries are consolidated. Across its various named facilities, Eastman Kodak generated approximately 286 notices affecting roughly 2,836 workers (depending on whether the entries represent distinct events or reporting variations). No other employer approaches this scale.
Pfizer, Inc. appears separately from Pfizer in the data, with combined entries of approximately 69 notices affecting 2,125 workers. Circuit City Stores, Inc. filed 23 notices affecting 1,428 workers during its collapse, while Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC generated 15 notices affecting 2,945 workers — indicating a single massive layoff event rather than gradual attrition. Goldman, Sachs & Co filed 13 notices affecting 1,737 workers, suggesting similar discrete reduction events rather than ongoing restructuring.
This concentration pattern has profound implications for labor market stability. When a single employer represents 5-10% of a region's workforce — as Kodak does in Rochester — that employer's strategic decisions about manufacturing footprint, technology adoption, and global supply chain location directly determine regional employment trajectories. The persistence of Kodak notices across the entire dataset reflects not a stable employer gradually shrinking but rather ongoing technology disruption (film to digital imaging) and capital reallocation away from New York production facilities.
Similarly, New Process Gear, Inc. (Division of Magna Powertrain) filed 17 notices affecting 1,777 workers — likely concentrated in upstate manufacturing regions — indicating automotive supply chain restructuring affecting major employers whose names are unfamiliar outside their immediate regions.
The distinction between temporary closures, permanent closures, and layoffs reveals the permanence of New York's employment disruption. Of the 8,423 notices, 4,387 (52%) represent permanent closures, 2,746 (33%) represent layoffs, 1,109 (13%) are of unknown type, and 181 (2%) represent temporary closures or temporary layoffs combined.
The prevalence of permanent closures indicates that roughly half of WARN-triggering events represent the complete elimination of workplace locations, not temporary workforce adjustments. This is qualitatively different from temporary layoffs or cyclical workforce reductions — a permanent closure destroys not just jobs but also accumulated human capital investments (worker expertise, informal knowledge networks, employer-specific training). Regions dependent on manufacturing and hospitality, where permanent closures dominate, face more severe long-term labor market effects than regions where layoffs and recalls are cyclically reversible.
The temporary closure and temporary layoff categories are negligible at 181 notices combined, suggesting that WARN-qualifying events are almost always permanent workforce separations rather than temporary pandemic-style furloughs. The 2020-2021 period, when temporary closures and furloughs dominated, still generated only 99 temporary closures and 82 temporary layoffs — indicating that even pandemic-era disruptions, while temporary in intent, were formalized through permanent separation language in most cases.
The industry and employer patterns reflect three distinct structural forces reshaping New York's economy. First, automation and technology displacement is evident in manufacturing and retail. Kodak's multi-decade decline reflects imaging technology disruption — digital photography eliminated not just demand for film but entire classes of manufacturing workers in chemical processing, film production, and optical equipment manufacturing. Manufacturing layoffs exceed manufacturing's current share of New York employment, indicating sector-wide overcapacity as surviving manufacturers adopt labor-saving technologies.
Second, demand migration and consumption pattern shifts drive hospitality, retail, and food service disruptions. Accommodation & Food layoffs accelerated sharply during and after 2020, but this partly reflects not pandemic-specific factors but rather the culmination of decades-long shifts toward casual dining, reduced business travel (as video conferencing replaced in-person meetings even before the pandemic), and consolidation of restaurant ownership. The persistence of these layoffs through 2021-2023 indicates structural oversupply rather than temporary demand destruction.
Third, geographic capital reallocation and global supply chain reorganization displace manufacturing employment. New Process Gear, Inc. layoffs reflect the broader automotive supply industry's restructuring toward lower-cost regions and the industry's incomplete transition to electric vehicle component manufacturing. The removal of manufacturing from traditional northeastern industrial centers toward southern and border regions — and increasingly toward Mexico and overseas — permanently relocates employment opportunities away from New York's legacy industrial regions.
Financial services layoffs reflect a fourth force: digital disruption and fintech displacement. Banking and securities employment concentrated in Manhattan for over a century because information asymmetries required physical proximity. Digital platforms and remote trading systems have eliminated this location requirement, allowing firms to consolidate operations, reduce headcount, and relocate remaining functions to lower-cost regions. The Credit Suisse layoff (2,945 workers) and Goldman Sachs layoff (1,737 workers) represent discretionary personnel reductions by profitable firms, not cyclical workforce adjustments, suggesting competitive pressure forcing efficiency improvements.
New York's current layoff trajectory — near-negligible activity in 2024-2025 — does not indicate labor market health but rather represents the baseline after structural adjustment. The state faces four persistent vulnerabilities.
First, concentrated employer dependence in upstate regions creates latent instability. Kodak's continued existence in Rochester, while diminished, means that any further consolidation would trigger another disruption. Similarly, regions dependent on single manufacturing plants or major healthcare institutions face disproportionate risk from individual corporate decisions.
Second, hospitality and retail remain oversupplied. While accommodation and food layoffs have declined from 2020 peaks, the underlying industry structure — large inventories of hotel rooms and restaurant seats serving demand that may not fully recover — suggests that further consolidation could occur if consumer preferences continue shifting toward experiential spending and away from traditional hospitality venues.
Third, financial services rationalization may not be complete. The migration of trading, wealth management, and back-office operations to lower-cost regions or overseas continues. Banks' ongoing digital transformation and cost-cutting cycles suggest that periodic layoff events could continue even among profitable firms.
Fourth, data discontinuity in 2024-2025 raises questions about whether WARN reporting itself is changing. The dramatic drop to 42 notices in 2024 and 32 in 2025 could reflect reporting lags, genuine workforce stability, or a shift toward separations occurring below the 25-employee threshold that would escape WARN reporting.
Workers and job seekers should monitor industry-specific trends rather than aggregate state-level data: accommodation workers should expect continued consolidation; manufacturing workers should expect ongoing automation; finance workers should anticipate rationalization; and healthcare workers should expect institutional consolidation. Regional concentrations of workforce vulnerability — particularly Rochester, Buffalo, and smaller upstate cities dependent on legacy manufacturing — deserve targeted policy attention through workforce retraining, business recruitment, and infrastructure investment designed to diversify employment bases away from single-employer dependence.
