WARN Act Layoffs in Massachusetts

In-Depth Analysis: Layoffs in Massachusetts

# Massachusetts Layoff Analysis: Economic Headwinds Across Multiple Sectors

Executive Summary: Scale and Trajectory

Massachusetts has experienced substantial workforce disruption over the past six years, with 743 WARN notices affecting 68,783 workers across the state economy. The concentration of this activity is striking: Boston alone accounts for 160 notices and 20,713 displaced workers—roughly 30 percent of all notices and 30 percent of affected workers—signaling that Massachusetts's economic challenges are heavily concentrated in its largest metropolitan hub and surrounding knowledge economy clusters.

The temporal distribution of layoffs reveals a sharply elevated trajectory since 2023. The pandemic year of 2020 produced the highest absolute numbers—247 notices affecting 34,098 workers—but the subsequent years show a persistent baseline of elevated restructuring. From 2023 to 2025, an average of 121 notices per year filed against roughly 7,400 workers annually. The 150 notices in 2025 alone represent the second-highest year on record and suggest that layoffs are not receding to pre-pandemic norms but rather have stabilized at a higher structural level. This pattern indicates that Massachusetts is not experiencing temporary cyclical adjustments but rather durable shifts in employment demand across multiple sectors.

Industry Analysis: Structural Fragmentation Across Healthcare, Food Service, and Manufacturing

The industry breakdown reveals that Massachusetts's layoff crisis is not monolithic but rather distributed across the state's three largest employment bases. Healthcare leads with 58 notices and 4,965 affected workers, followed closely by Accommodation & Food Services with 47 notices and 7,646 workers, and Manufacturing with 47 notices and 4,197 workers. Together, these three sectors account for 152 notices and 16,808 workers—nearly 40 percent of all layoff activity.

The healthcare sector's prominence is particularly significant given that Massachusetts hosts the nation's largest concentration of academic medical centers, research hospitals, and biotech firms. Companies such as Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Revvity, Inc, Charles River Laboratories, Tufts Medical Center, Inc, Sage Therapeutics, Inc, and Atrius Health collectively filed multiple notices affecting thousands of workers. The healthcare layoffs reflect industry-wide pressures: consolidation among hospital networks, automation of routine laboratory and administrative functions, the maturation of high-growth biotech firms past their hyper-growth phase, and reimbursement pressure from payers. Several of these firms—Takeda Pharmaceuticals alone filed six notices across different entities—suggest portfolio restructuring rather than financial distress, pointing to strategic consolidation in pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing.

The Accommodation & Food Services sector's prominence is more cyclical but increasingly structural. Friendly's Restaurant filed four notices affecting 2,369 workers, while OS Restaurant Services, LLC, Legal Sea Foods, LLC, Dave & Buster's, Sky Chefs, Inc, and Panera Bread collectively account for substantial employment losses. The restaurants and food service sector faces a confluence of pressures: labor cost inflation that accelerates faster in Massachusetts than nationally (reflecting tight regional labor markets and higher state minimum wages), changing consumer preferences toward delivery and fast-casual formats, and continued real estate pressures in high-rent markets like Boston. The fact that legacy casual dining chains are over-represented in the data suggests that established players with high fixed costs and traditional operating models face the greatest restructuring pressure.

Manufacturing represents a more subtle challenge. With 47 notices and 4,197 workers, Massachusetts's manufacturing base—historically smaller than in other industrial states—continues to rationalize. Companies like Feeney Brothers Excavation, LLC and various smaller producers file notices, but the data also captures contract manufacturers and specialized producers. Massachusetts manufacturing has long been tilted toward high-value specialty products and equipment rather than commodity production, yet these firms still face pressures from global supply chains, automation, and consolidation. The fragmentation of manufacturing across multiple small notices (no single manufacturer dominates the top employers list) suggests that Massachusetts is experiencing distributed decline rather than a few catastrophic plant closures.

The remaining 591 notices spanning Transportation, Education, Finance & Insurance, Information & Technology, Utilities, Professional Services, Retail, Agriculture, Administrative Support, and Arts & Entertainment demonstrate that Massachusetts's layoff pattern is genuinely economy-wide. Education contributed 25 notices affecting 4,566 workers, reflecting both demographic decline in school-age populations in some regions and budget pressures in higher education. Transportation saw 26 notices and 1,860 workers, encompassing WeDriveU DBA Kiessling Transit, Inc and smaller carriers. Even Information & Technology, the sector that Massachusetts actively cultivates as a growth engine, recorded 9 notices affecting 479 workers, suggesting that the tech sector's broader contraction—visible in national data from 2023 forward—has reached into the state's smaller tech hubs outside the Cambridge innovation corridor.

Geographic Concentration: Boston and the Knowledge Economy Corridor

Boston's dominance in Massachusetts layoff data is overwhelming. With 160 notices and 20,713 affected workers, Boston accounts for roughly one worker displaced for every eight workers in the entire city's labor force (assuming a Boston metro workforce around 175,000). Cambridge, Boston's immediate neighbor and home to MIT, Harvard, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech clusters, recorded 47 notices affecting 7,331 workers—the second-highest volume and demonstrating that the layoff problem is concentrated in the state's premier knowledge economy corridor.

Together, Boston and Cambridge account for 207 notices and 28,044 affected workers—over 40 percent of statewide layoff activity despite representing a significantly smaller share of the state's total employment base. This concentration reveals that Massachusetts's economic challenges are most acute not in struggling post-industrial regions but precisely in the high-wage, high-cost, innovation-driven centers where the state's competitive advantage supposedly resides.

The secondary cities tell an important story about where layoff pressure radiates outward. Waltham (18 notices, 2,108 workers) and Andover (15 notices, 1,305 workers) are both home to significant pharmaceutical, biotech, and advanced manufacturing clusters—Takeda Pharmaceuticals operates major facilities in these areas—and their elevated layoff counts reflect pharmaceutical sector restructuring. Worcester (20 notices, 1,446 workers) and Springfield (11 notices, 1,295 workers) represent larger interior Massachusetts cities that continue to experience workforce rationalization. Holyoke (9 notices, 1,250 workers) stands out with an exceptionally high worker-to-notice ratio, suggesting that one or two large employers in that city experienced significant reductions.

The geographic concentration matters not merely as a statistical artifact but as an indicator of uneven economic stress. The Boston-Cambridge corridor can absorb layoffs more readily because of labor market density, diverse employment options, and the continued flow of venture capital and business formation in technology and life sciences. Interior Massachusetts cities like Worcester and Springfield have fewer alternative employers and less developed knowledge economy clusters, meaning that layoffs hit harder on a per-capita basis. Workers displaced from pharmaceutical manufacturing in Waltham can realistically find comparable work elsewhere in the greater Boston area; workers displaced from a large facility in Holyoke face more limited options.

Major Employers: Strategic Restructuring at Scale

The top individual employers filing WARN notices reveal patterns of strategic corporate action rather than distress-driven liquidation. Friendly's Restaurant, despite being the largest single employer affected, filed four notices totaling 2,369 workers—consistent with that company's multi-year store consolidation and brand repositioning. Wayfair, LLC, the Boston-based furniture e-commerce company, filed three notices affecting 2,408 workers, reflecting the company's transition from explosive growth phase to sustainable profitability (and the associated workforce right-sizing).

Le Tote, Inc (5 notices, 289 workers) and Paper Source (3 notices, 400 workers) represent specialty retail players contending with structural decline in apparel and home goods retail. Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Takeda Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc collectively filed nine notices affecting 940 workers, indicating systematic portfolio consolidation and manufacturing footprint optimization following large acquisitions. These are not struggling companies on the brink of insolvency but rather established firms rationalizing their operations to extract greater profit from smaller workforces.

Sage Therapeutics, Inc (3 notices, 502 workers), a psychiatry-focused biotech firm, and Revvity, Inc (5 notices, 253 workers) represent the biotech sector's contraction. Both are research-stage or specialty pharmaceutical companies that may have over-hired during favorable capital conditions and are now calibrating to sustainable burn rates and development timelines. CVS Health (4 notices, 324 workers) and Atrius Health (4 notices, 372 workers) represent consolidation in healthcare delivery and retail pharmacy—sectors undergoing rapid structural change driven by Amazon's entry into pharmacy, mail-order drug distribution, and telemedicine adoption.

The diversity of industries represented among top employers—restaurants, e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, healthcare delivery, laboratories, and transit services—underscores that Massachusetts is not experiencing a sector-specific shock but rather a broadbased recalibration of labor demand across the entire economy.

Historical Trends: Persistently Elevated Disruption

The year-by-year breakdown reveals a critical historical pattern. The 2020 pandemic spike—247 notices affecting 34,098 workers—represented acute crisis. However, rather than declining steadily as the economy reopened, layoff activity has stabilized at a persistently elevated baseline. The 2021-2022 dip (34 and 60 notices respectively) suggested temporary recovery, but 2023 initiated a new elevated trend: 103 notices in 2023, 109 in 2024, and 150 in 2025 represent accelerating activity, not recovery.

This trajectory contradicts narratives of pandemic recovery or "strong" labor markets. Massachusetts unemployment rates have remained relatively low by national standards, but this obscures the reality of substantial restructuring. Unemployment can remain low while layoff activity remains high if new job creation through startups and business formation offsets displacement. Indeed, Massachusetts's venture capital ecosystem and concentration of biotech and technology companies can absorb some displaced workers. However, the increasing notice count suggests that this absorption capacity is not keeping pace with displacement.

The 2025 data (150 notices through a portion of the year) projects to an annual pace exceeding 2023-2024 activity. If 2025 ends near 150 notices, it will represent the second-highest year since tracking began, signaling that the structural pressures driving layoffs are intensifying rather than moderating.

Economic Context: Massachusetts's Paradoxical Position

Massachusetts occupies a paradoxical position in the U.S. economy. The state has some of the nation's strongest metrics on median household income, education attainment, and concentration of high-wage employment in technology, healthcare, and professional services. Boston and Cambridge are global centers for biotech research, venture capital deployment, and software development. Yet this concentration of advanced economic activity coexists with layoff patterns suggesting significant stress.

This stress reflects several interconnected phenomena. First, the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors—cornerstones of Massachusetts's economy—are experiencing industry-wide consolidation and rationalization. Patent expirations, declining R&D productivity relative to spend, and mega-mergers have created systematic headwinds for employment growth in these sectors even as revenues remain robust. Second, the Boston metropolitan area's extreme real estate costs create pressure on businesses to reduce occupancy and headcount relative to revenue. Third, automation and digitalization are proceeding rapidly in sectors like healthcare administration, financial services, and manufacturing—areas where Massachusetts has significant employment. Fourth, retail and food service—traditionally sources of entry-level employment—are undergoing structural decline and consolidation.

The paradox, then, is that Massachusetts has successfully positioned itself as a global knowledge economy center, but knowledge economy jobs are increasingly subject to automation (software engineering productivity gains, AI-driven data analysis, automation of routine analysis), competitive pressure from lower-cost regions globally, and portfolio-driven employment volatility as companies cycle through growth and consolidation phases. The state's success in knowledge economy development has not protected it from substantial layoff activity; if anything, the concentration of employment in high-volatility sectors may amplify it.

Outlook: Monitoring Points and Risk Factors

Massachusetts faces several emerging pressures that warrant close monitoring. The continuing elevation of layoff notices through 2025 suggests that the structural forces driving displacement have not abated. The concentration of activity in Boston and Cambridge means that the state's premier knowledge economy centers face the most acute workforce adjustment pressure. Workers displaced from high-wage biotech, pharmaceutical, and healthcare positions in Boston face a retraining challenge; there are limited alternative employers offering comparable compensation in specialized fields.

The acceleration of automation—visible in healthcare (diagnostic imaging, administrative automation), pharmaceuticals (robotic drug compound synthesis, computational drug discovery), and professional services (legal AI, financial analysis automation)—suggests that future layoff notices may concentrate in higher-wage roles previously considered insulated from automation. The concentration of restaurants and food service in the data also warrants attention as labor shortages and inflation in this sector continue to push automation investment and consolidation toward fewer larger operators.

Policymakers should monitor whether Massachusetts experiences skill-based divergence in layoff patterns—whether high-wage professional and technical roles are being displaced faster than is sustainable through retraining and job creation. The education sector's contribution to layoff notices (25 notices, 4,566 workers) reflects demographic challenges and fiscal pressures that may worsen if state revenues decline or higher education consolidation accelerates. Regional disparities between Boston-Cambridge and interior Massachusetts are likely to widen if knowledge economy layoffs disproportionately displace workers in high-cost urban cores while manufacturing and traditional services decline in more peripheral regions.

The baseline expectation should be that Massachusetts's layoff activity will remain elevated relative to historical pre-2020 norms. The state's economic future depends on whether its knowledge economy clusters—Cambridge biotech, Boston venture capital, technology development—can generate job creation faster than mature sectors shed employment.