Tracking mass layoff and plant closure notices filed under the WARN Act in Louisiana, updated daily. Explore the interactive data →
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# Louisiana's Layoff Landscape: A Comprehensive Economic Analysis
Louisiana has experienced 740 WARN Act notices affecting 92,867 workers over the period captured in this dataset, representing a significant employment disruption concentrated in discrete industrial and geographic clusters. The most striking feature of Louisiana's layoff pattern is its extreme volatility around a catastrophic spike in 2020, when 179 notices displaced 23,657 workers—more than a quarter of all layoffs in the entire dataset despite representing just one year. This concentration demands explanation: the COVID-19 pandemic devastated Louisiana's hospitality, leisure, and energy sectors simultaneously, collapsing demand precisely where the state's economy is most vulnerable.
The trajectory since 2020 reveals only partial recovery. Annual layoff notices have stabilized between 14 and 34 notices annually, with 2025 showing a concerning uptick to 34 notices affecting 6,916 workers. This represents the second-highest worker displacement per notice in the dataset's history, suggesting that recent layoffs, though fewer in number, are hitting larger operations. The data indicates Louisiana remains structurally fragile—not victim to a single crisis, but exposed to cascading vulnerabilities across its primary employment bases.
Manufacturing stands as Louisiana's primary source of WARN-eligible layoffs, accounting for 157 notices and displacing 20,169 workers—nearly one-quarter of all affected workers. This dominance reflects the state's historical identity as an industrial powerhouse anchored in petrochemical production, oil refining, aerospace, and shipbuilding. The prominence of Lockheed Martin Corporation with 33 notices affecting 1,651 workers underscores Louisiana's role in the U.S. defense industrial base, particularly in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge metropolitan areas where aerospace and advanced manufacturing clusters persist.
Yet manufacturing's vulnerability emerges clearly when examining complementary sectors. Mining & Energy, capturing 50 notices and 5,007 workers, reveals the state's precarious dependence on commodity prices and federal energy policy. Devon Energy Corporation, filing five notices for 202 workers, and the broader energy sector's repeated workforce reductions reflect crude oil price collapses (particularly the 2014-2016 downturn and 2020 pandemic-induced crash) that ricocheted through supply chains. The state lacks diversification: when energy contracts, Louisiana bleeds jobs faster than diversified states can absorb them.
Construction, with 28 notices and 7,716 workers, partially offsets this narrative—such layoffs often reflect cyclical downturns rather than structural decline, and the relatively high worker-to-notice ratio suggests large project completions rather than permanent capacity reductions. However, construction's volatility makes it an unreliable employment stabilizer.
The manufacturing ecosystem's interconnectedness creates multiplier effects. Ingevity Corporation (six notices, 354 workers), International Paper (three notices, 775 workers), and Stupp Corporation (three notices, 719 workers) represent the supply chains feeding Louisiana's primary manufacturing base. When major manufacturers like Northrop Grumman (five notices, 5,247 workers—the largest single employer layoff event) or Lockheed Martin reduce headcount, they trigger cascading reductions throughout supplier networks. The cumulative effect of 157 notices concentrates employment risk in communities where manufacturing represents a disproportionate share of local economic activity.
The second-largest employment shock came from Accommodation & Food Services, which filed 44 notices affecting 8,829 workers. This sector reveals Louisiana's tourism economy vulnerability, with Hilton (four notices, 792 workers) and Sheraton Hotel (three notices, 601 workers) anchoring New Orleans' lodging industry. The sector's concentration in New Orleans—where 143 of 740 total notices originated—creates dangerous economic dependency. Tourism accounts for substantial tax revenue and employment in a city where alternative economic bases remain underdeveloped.
Healthcare, displacing 8,889 workers across 67 notices, represents a different story. Healthcare layoffs typically reflect consolidation, efficiency improvements, or changing reimbursement structures rather than demand collapse. The frequency and scale of healthcare notices suggest Louisiana's hospital systems are undergoing significant operational restructuring—potentially reflecting Medicare payment pressures, the shift toward outpatient care, or consolidation among provider networks.
The 2020 data reveals how these service sectors collapsed simultaneously. That year's 179 notices and 23,657 displacements concentrated in hospitality, healthcare, and leisure sectors that lost customers overnight. Louisiana's limited industrial diversity meant the state lacked offsetting employment growth in technology, professional services, or other recession-resistant sectors that cushioned impacts in states like Texas, North Carolina, or Colorado during the same period.
New Orleans dominates the geographic distribution with 143 notices affecting 17,373 workers—19% of all notices and 19% of all affected workers. This concentration is not random: the city's economy depends heavily on tourism, energy company headquarters, and port operations. When Boomtown New Orleans filed three notices, or when tourism collapsed in 2020, the impact concentrated in a single labor market. Unemployment in Orleans Parish during 2020-2021 exceeded state averages by significant margins, indicating limited job substitution opportunities.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana's second-largest city, filed 66 notices affecting 7,093 workers, reflecting its role as the state's government seat and petrochemical hub. Lockheed Martin's substantial presence in the Baton Rouge area means aerospace employment fluctuations send direct shocks through local unemployment statistics. The pattern suggests Baton Rouge has somewhat better diversification than New Orleans, with government employment providing countercyclical stability.
Shreveport, with 47 notices and 6,685 workers affected, reveals a city struggling with industrial decline. The relatively high proportion of workers displaced per notice suggests Shreveport relies on fewer, larger employers—meaning individual plant closures or major reductions create outsized local impacts. This employment concentration makes Shreveport's labor market riskier for workers seeking stable career paths.
Fort Polk's inclusion in the top 15 cities with 11 notices and 2,512 workers reflects military installation employment's volatility. Federal budget cycles and base realignment decisions create periodic shocks to military-dependent communities that workers cannot predict or mitigate individually.
The geographic pattern reveals Louisiana's fundamental weakness: the state's largest cities lack diversified employment bases. Unlike Austin, Denver, or Charlotte—which weathered 2020 better through technology, professional services, and financial sector strength—Louisiana's metropolitan areas remain dependent on extractive industries, tourism, government, and legacy manufacturing. This structure generates repeated employment shocks when these sectors contract.
The employer data reveals a striking pattern: a small number of large corporations account for a disproportionate share of displacement. The top five employers (Lockheed Martin, Hostess Brands, Sodexo, Aramark, and Ingevity) file 64 notices affecting 4,112 workers. More significantly, these companies are repeat filers—Lockheed Martin with 33 notices suggests ongoing workforce adjustments rather than a single major restructuring, indicating chronic rightsizing in aerospace and defense contracting.
Northrop Grumman and its subsidiary Northrop Grumman Technical Services combined file 10 notices affecting 6,669 workers—the largest cumulative displacement from any single corporate entity. This concentration in defense contractors reflects Louisiana's strategic importance to the U.S. defense industrial base, but also its vulnerability to federal budget politics and international geopolitical shifts. When Congress debates defense spending or when military strategy shifts, Louisiana's economy absorbs shocks that other states with more diversified industrial bases avoid.
Sodexo and Aramark, combined food service operations filing 12 notices and affecting 2,031 workers, reveal institutional and corporate food service consolidation. These companies operate cafeterias, food services, and hospitality operations across Louisiana's military bases, universities, and corporate campuses. Their repeated layoffs indicate efficiency improvements and staffing reductions in contracted food services—a pattern that destroyed stable middle-class employment (food service management) and replaced it with lower-wage, less stable positions.
Hostess Brands, filing 13 notices for 376 workers, reflects the broader collapse of legacy food manufacturing and distribution. The company's multiple notices suggest repeated distribution network and production adjustments, with Louisiana facilities repeatedly identified as surplus capacity in a consolidating industry.
These patterns indicate that Louisiana's layoffs are not primarily driven by new competitive threats or revolutionary technological disruption, but rather by mature industries undergoing rationalization: defense consolidation, food service automation, energy commodity cycles, and legacy manufacturing optimization. These are structural adjustments to industries that were already declining—not responses to emerging opportunities elsewhere.
The year-by-year data reveals a fundamentally altered labor market structure. From 2007-2019, annual layoff notices averaged roughly 30-35 annually, with 2010 being an anomaly (36 notices but 8,872 workers). This earlier period reflects the Great Recession's tail (2009-2011 saw elevated notices) gradually normalizing into a steady-state pattern of industrial restructuring.
Then 2020 shattered the pattern entirely. With 179 notices affecting 23,657 workers, the pandemic created a layoff intensity never before seen in the dataset. The post-2020 period shows incomplete recovery: 2021 and 2022 dropped to 14-22 notices annually, suggesting some stabilization. However, 2025 is already approaching 34 notices, and the projection for 2026 (only six notices recorded so far) remains incomplete.
More concerning than raw notice counts is the per-notice displacement rate. Across the entire dataset, the average displacement is 125 workers per notice. In 2020, this reached 132 workers per notice. In 2025, it has climbed to 203 workers per notice—suggesting that recent layoffs are hitting larger operations or representing more complete facility closures. This escalation indicates that Louisiana's recovery from 2020 remains incomplete and fragile.
The historical trajectory reveals no sustained improvement. The state has not experienced a period of five consecutive years with declining layoff notices or worker displacement. This stands in stark contrast to national trends where the 2010s saw generally declining unemployment and improving labor market conditions. Louisiana's persistent layoff activity suggests the state's employment base is undergoing chronic stress rather than cyclical adjustment.
Louisiana's layoff patterns reflect the state's deeper economic structure. As of recent data, the state's economy remains anchored in energy (11% of employment and a much higher share of GDP), petrochemicals, tourism, government, and legacy manufacturing. Technology, professional services, and finance represent much smaller employment shares than national averages. The WARN data shows this structure precisely: energy, manufacturing, and hospitality dominate the layoff notices because they dominate the employment base.
The state's median household income trails national averages, and income growth has lagged national trends for two decades. This reflects both lower-wage industrial structure and limited high-wage service sector employment. When manufacturing and energy employment contract, displaced workers struggle to find equivalent-wage replacement positions. A refinery operator earning $65,000 cannot simply transition to food service at $28,000, yet Louisiana lacks sufficient technology, professional services, and advanced manufacturing jobs to absorb displaced workers at comparable wages.
Education represents another vulnerability. Louisiana's higher education system, while containing institutions like Tulane and LSU, does not generate sufficient local STEM talent retention. Graduates migrate to technology hubs in Texas, Florida, and beyond, depriving Louisiana of the human capital necessary to attract or develop knowledge-intensive industries. The 11 notices and 1,683 workers in Education reveal layoffs in colleges and universities themselves—suggesting budgetary stress in the institutions meant to retrain displaced workers.
The 2025 data suggests Louisiana's employment challenges are not receding. With 34 notices already filed and 6,916 workers affected, the state is tracking toward another above-average year. The concentration of recent layoffs in larger operations (203 workers per notice) indicates that remaining disruption will be severe for affected communities.
Workers and job seekers in Louisiana face several specific risks. First, geographic concentration means that layoffs in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, or Shreveport create local unemployment spikes that compress wages across the affected region as displaced workers flood available positions. Second, sector concentration means that skills developed in energy, refining, or legacy manufacturing transfer poorly to growth sectors, forcing mid-career workers into retraining or wage losses. Third, the absence of large technology, professional services, or financial services sectors means that Louisiana lacks the dynamic job creation that typically offsets manufacturing layoffs in diversified economies.
Policymakers should monitor several indicators closely: energy commodity prices (crude oil and natural gas prices directly drive energy sector employment), federal defense spending decisions (disproportionately affecting Louisiana's large aerospace and defense sector), and national business investment trends in manufacturing (which determine whether companies modernize Louisiana plants or relocate capacity). Additionally, the hospitality sector's recovery trajectory remains uncertain—post-pandemic tourism patterns suggest New Orleans' conventions and leisure travel may not return to pre-2020 levels, implying permanently reduced employment in accommodation and food services.
Louisiana's layoff data ultimately illustrates a state trapped between declining industries and emerging ones, geographically concentrated in cities dependent on specific employers, and lacking the industrial diversity that provides economic resilience. The WARN notices are not merely statistics—they represent workers whose careers, communities, and family security depend on economic transitions that the state's current structure cannot easily accommodate. Without deliberate diversification strategies and workforce development initiatives, Louisiana's pattern of recurring layoff shocks will persist, with workers bearing the cumulative costs of structural economic change.
