WARN Act Layoffs in Wisconsin

In-Depth Analysis: Layoffs in Wisconsin

# COMPREHENSIVE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS: WISCONSIN LAYOFFS & WORKFORCE REDUCTIONS

Executive Summary: Scale and Trajectory of Wisconsin's Layoff Crisis

Wisconsin has experienced 1,939 WARN Act notices affecting 177,077 workers over the past decade, representing a profound restructuring of the state's employment base. The scale becomes immediately apparent when contextualized: these figures encompass formal layoff announcements covering firms with 50 or more employees, filing under Wisconsin's Business Closing and Mass Layoff Law, which requires 60 days' notice to affected workers and the Department of Workforce Development.

The distribution across time reveals a state experiencing uneven recovery punctuated by sectoral shocks. The 2020 pandemic year generated 428 notices affecting 39,193 workers—nearly 22 percent of the entire decade's layoff volume concentrated in a single year. This spike reflects the acute disruption to hospitality, transportation, and retail sectors during lockdowns and economic uncertainty. However, the more recent data from 2023 through 2025 suggests stabilization rather than deterioration. The past two years have averaged 82 notices annually affecting roughly 5,900 workers per year, substantially below the pre-pandemic baseline of approximately 110 notices annually affecting 9,600 workers. This normalization suggests Wisconsin's labor market has absorbed pandemic-era disruptions without descending into structural employment crisis, though underlying sectoral pressures remain acute.

The granularity of the WARN notice system captures only formal, planned reductions at larger employers. The true employment adjustment in Wisconsin is substantially larger when accounting for smaller firms below the 50-employee threshold, seasonal fluctuations, and voluntary separations. Nevertheless, WARN filings represent the economy's most significant planned workforce reductions and thus serve as the most reliable leading indicator of regional labor market stress.

Industry Dynamics: Manufacturing Decline and Healthcare Fragmentation

Manufacturing dominates Wisconsin's layoff landscape with 183 notices affecting 20,368 workers—representing 11.5 percent of all workers affected statewide. This concentration reflects both the state's historical economic identity and the accelerating structural challenges facing industrial production. Wisconsin's manufacturing base, built on machine tools, agricultural equipment, automotive components, and consumer durables, faces simultaneous pressures from automation, global competition, and shifting demand patterns.

The most prominent manufacturing employer filing WARN notices is Hutchinson Technology Inc., which has filed eight notices displacing 731 workers. Hutchinson Technology manufactures precision components for data storage and other industrial applications—a sector experiencing profound technological disruption as cloud computing shifts investment away from traditional hardware infrastructure. Similarly, Briggs & Stratton LLC, the small engine manufacturer headquartered in Milwaukee, filed five notices affecting 444 workers. The company has struggled with declining demand for lawn equipment as both consumer behavior and commercial landscaping shift toward electric alternatives, while simultaneously facing overcapacity in North American production.

Retail represents the second-largest source of layoffs by worker count, with 95 notices affecting 14,930 workers—8.4 percent of total displacement. This sector tells a narrative of accelerating structural decline driven by e-commerce penetration and changing consumer behavior. Foot Locker filed five notices affecting 544 workers, while Kmart (before its complete exit) generated five notices affecting 359 workers. The retail collapse reflects both the secular shift to online commerce and the specific vulnerability of traditional brick-and-mortar footwear and general merchandise retailers facing Amazon's competitive pressure. These are not temporary adjustments but rather existential threats to retail's traditional labor-intensive model.

The Healthcare sector generated 157 notices affecting 10,843 workers, representing the third-largest source of displacement. This concentration initially appears counterintuitive given healthcare's general employment growth trajectory, but reflects significant consolidation and operational restructuring within the sector. Marshfield Clinic Health System, Wisconsin's largest private healthcare employer, filed 55 notices affecting 1,172 workers across multiple locations and service lines. This extensive filing pattern suggests not facility closures but rather ongoing administrative consolidation, shift reductions, and service line rationalization as healthcare systems pursue margin improvement in an environment of stagnant reimbursement rates and rising labor costs. Similarly, Prevea Clinic Inc. filed 14 notices affecting 646 workers, again suggesting operational restructuring rather than facility closure. Healthcare layoffs in Wisconsin reflect the industry-wide transition toward integrated delivery systems and the elimination of redundant administrative and clinical positions as competing systems merge and optimize.

Transportation and Logistics generated 106 notices affecting 9,806 workers, a figure concentrated in two major employers. Yellow Corporation (formerly YRC Worldwide), the trucking and logistics giant, filed 17 notices affecting 898 workers, reflecting the company's well-documented financial distress and eventual emergence from bankruptcy. Air Wisconsin Airlines LLC and Air Wisconsin Airlines filed a combined 13 notices affecting 2,317 workers. These reductions capture the profound disruption to regional aviation caused by pilot shortages, fuel price volatility, and reduced demand for regional carrier service as major carriers consolidate routes.

The Accommodation and Food Services sector generated 127 notices affecting 10,327 workers, reflecting COVID-era closures and subsequent rationalization. EYM Chicken of Wisconsin dba KFC filed eight notices affecting 162 workers, while Spectra Food Services and Hospitality filed seven notices affecting 442 workers. This sector experienced the sharpest pandemic shocks and continues to face structural challenges including rising minimum wages, competition for service workers, and ongoing pressure to reduce labor costs through automation and reduced hours.

Information and Technology, despite Wisconsin's limited tech sector presence, generated 45 notices affecting 2,705 workers. CapTel Inc., which manufactures captioned telephone devices for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, filed five notices affecting 822 workers. This company faces existential disruption from smartphone-based captioning applications that replicate its specialized hardware functionality at negligible cost.

Geographic Concentration: Urban Centers Under Strain

Wisconsin's layoffs concentrate heavily in the state's two major metropolitan areas and select secondary cities, revealing uneven regional economic pressure. Milwaukee dominates with 268 notices affecting 32,992 workers—18.6 percent of all statewide displacement. This concentration reflects Milwaukee's status as Wisconsin's economic center, home to major employers across healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, and logistics. The sheer volume of Milwaukee-area layoffs indicates that the city's economic restructuring has been particularly pronounced, with traditional manufacturing and blue-collar employment eroding faster than replacement job creation in advanced services.

Madison, the state capital and home to the University of Wisconsin system, filed 159 notices affecting 18,354 workers—10.4 percent of statewide displacement. Gannett, the newspaper publishing conglomerate, filed six notices affecting 605 workers in the Madison area, reflecting the industry's ongoing collapse as print advertising revenue evaporates. Despite its university anchor and state government employment, Madison has not been insulated from sectoral disruption, suggesting that even knowledge-based regional economies face adjustment pressures.

Appleton, located in Fox Valley in northeastern Wisconsin, filed 54 notices affecting 11,075 workers despite being substantially smaller than Milwaukee or Madison. This outsized concentration reflects the presence of Marshfield Clinic Health System's significant regional footprint and other major employers in a relatively compact labor market. For Appleton, this level of displacement carries disproportionate economic impact given the city's smaller overall employment base.

Waukesha County suburbs including Waukesha itself (32 notices, 6,140 workers), New Berlin (31 notices, 2,497 workers), Brookfield (25 notices, 6,077 workers), and Wauwatosa (27 notices, 3,313 workers) collectively account for substantial displacement in the Milwaukee metropolitan area's prosperous western suburbs. This geographic pattern indicates that even Wisconsin's wealthier suburban regions have not escaped structural employment adjustment.

Secondary cities including Green Bay (36 notices, 3,817 workers), Eau Claire (34 notices, 2,448 workers), Janesville (30 notices, 2,862 workers), and Sturtevant (22 notices, 3,469 workers) demonstrate that layoff pressures diffuse throughout the state rather than concentrating exclusively in major metros. Marquis Yachts, which filed six notices affecting 999 workers, operated in Fond du Lac, illustrating how specialized manufacturing sectors can generate significant localized employment shocks.

The geographic distribution suggests that Wisconsin's labor market adjustment has been broad-based rather than concentrated, implying that workforce development resources must be distributed across multiple regional economies rather than concentrated in distressed regions. No single area dominates the state's total layoff volume sufficiently to qualify as a recession-scale crisis zone, yet the cumulative effect across distributed locations represents significant regional economic stress.

Major Employers: Sectoral Stories and Strategic Retrenchment

The companies filing the most WARN notices reveal distinct strategic narratives rather than uniform crisis dynamics. Marshfield Clinic Health System, with 55 notices affecting 1,172 workers, represents healthcare consolidation and administrative restructuring. Marshfield is Wisconsin's largest private healthcare system, operating multiple hospitals and clinics across central and northern Wisconsin. The extensive filing pattern suggests not catastrophic decline but rather ongoing operational integration as the system pursues economies of scale and margin improvement in an environment where Medicare reimbursement rates remain stagnant while labor costs accelerate. Marshfield's layoffs likely reflect administrative consolidation, elimination of duplicate positions following facility additions, and shift reductions rather than service reductions.

Yellow Corporation, with 17 notices affecting 898 workers, represents structural distress in traditional trucking. The company, formerly known as YRC Worldwide, dominated less-than-truckload (LTL) trucking but faced existential competitive pressure from XPO Logistics, ArcBest, and other competitors. Yellow's Wisconsin operations centered on Milwaukee and constituted one element of a company-wide restructuring that ultimately forced the company into bankruptcy in 2023. Yellow's collapse reflects both overcapacity in trucking and the company's failure to adapt to changing customer preferences for real-time tracking and digital integration.

Prevea Clinic Inc. filed 14 notices affecting 646 workers, representing another healthcare system's consolidation activities. Prevea operates clinics across Green Bay and northeastern Wisconsin and has pursued aggressive integration with stronger health systems, generating layoffs as redundant positions are eliminated.

Air Wisconsin Airlines LLC and related entities filed 13 notices affecting 2,317 workers, representing the acute vulnerability of regional carriers to fuel price volatility, pilot shortages, and major carrier competition. Air Wisconsin historically operated hub operations in Madison but faced contraction as major carriers (United, American, Delta) consolidated regional flying onto larger aircraft and reduced the need for regional partner carriers.

CapTel Inc., with five notices affecting 822 workers, exemplifies how specialized hardware manufacturers face disruption from software and smartphone alternatives. The company manufactured captioned telephones specifically designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, but smartphone applications offering real-time captioning displaced this market.

Historical Trajectory: Pandemic Shock and Subsequent Stabilization

The year-by-year evolution reveals a labor market experiencing acute pandemic disruption followed by surprising stability. The 2016-2019 period averaged approximately 110 notices annually affecting 9,600 workers per year, establishing the pre-pandemic baseline. This period encompassed the tail end of the post-2008 recovery, characterized by modest employment growth and secular decline in traditional manufacturing and retail.

The 2020 pandemic year generated 428 notices affecting 39,193 workers—a 371 percent increase in notices and 409 percent increase in affected workers compared to 2019. This spike reflected the acute economic contraction as lockdowns forced temporary and permanent closures of restaurants, retail, hospitality, and other contact-intensive sectors. The 2020 surge represents the single largest annual employment displacement in the dataset and should not be extrapolated forward as a new baseline.

The recovery proceeded rapidly. 2021 saw only 44 notices affecting 3,357 workers, representing a 90 percent decline in notices and 91 percent decline in affected workers compared to 2020. This sharp recovery suggests that many 2020 layoffs were temporary furloughs rather than permanent separations, and that vaccines and economic reopening restored demand relatively quickly.

The 2022-2025 period has averaged roughly 82 notices affecting 5,900 workers annually, representing normalization between pre-pandemic and pandemic peaks. The 2023 figure of 134 notices affecting 7,076 workers slightly exceeds this average, potentially reflecting some delayed adjustment to rising interest rates and technology sector retrenchment, but the 2024 and 2025 figures (97 notices and 68 notices respectively) suggest return to sustainable levels rather than deterioration.

The forward-looking data through 2026 should be treated cautiously, as only 11 notices affecting 690 workers have been filed so far in that year, reflecting the lag between layoff announcements and WARN filings rather than forecasting capacity. Nevertheless, the overall trajectory indicates that Wisconsin's labor market has absorbed pandemic disruptions and returned to a baseline characterized by sectoral adjustment rather than cyclical crisis.

Wisconsin's Economic Context: Structural Vulnerability and Regional Identity

Wisconsin's layoff patterns reflect the state's broader economic identity as a manufacturing and logistics hub undergoing profound structural transition. The state's economy has historically centered on machine tools, agricultural equipment, paper products, food processing, dairy products, and logistics—sectors that face converging headwinds from automation, global competition, and shifting demand patterns.

The manufacturing concentration in WARN filings (11.5 percent of affected workers, compared to roughly 8 percent nationally) reflects Wisconsin's above-average manufacturing employment share. Wisconsin's economy remains more manufacturing-intensive than the national average, implying greater vulnerability to automation and offshoring than regions with more diversified, service-oriented economies.

The healthcare concentration reflects both the sector's genuine importance to Wisconsin's employment base and the specific vulnerability of healthcare labor to consolidation dynamics. Wisconsin's healthcare sector includes major systems like Marshfield Clinic, Froedtert Health, HSHS, and UW Health, all pursuing efficiency improvements that generate layoffs even as healthcare employment grows nationally.

The retail concentration reflects Wisconsin's role as a regional retail and logistics hub, with distribution centers and major retailers headquartered in the state. The structural decline of retail as e-commerce penetrates is disproportionately visible in WARN filings because large retailers generate substantial formal filings, whereas smaller retailers may exit through quiet attrition.

Wisconsin's relatively modest information technology sector presence (45 notices, 2,705 workers) indicates that the state has not successfully diversified into high-wage knowledge work at the scale seen in coastal tech hubs. This leaves Wisconsin vulnerable to the erosion of traditional manufacturing and retail employment without sufficient high-wage job creation to offset displacement.

Outlook: Risks, Opportunities, and Policy Imperatives

The current layoff trajectory suggests Wisconsin's labor market has stabilized following pandemic disruption, with 2023-2025 averaging sustainable levels consistent with normal sectoral adjustment. However, three significant risks warrant close monitoring.

First, automation in manufacturing will accelerate despite near-term stabilization. The companies filing WARN notices today—component manufacturers, small engine producers, and industrial equipment makers—face inexorable pressure to automate production. Recent advances in robotics, computer vision, and machine learning make automation economically justified at lower wage levels than previously feasible, potentially accelerating manufacturing employment losses throughout Wisconsin's industrial heartland.

Second, healthcare consolidation will generate persistent layoffs as systems pursue efficiency improvements and eliminate redundant positions. The concentration of healthcare layoffs among large systems suggests this process remains in early to middle stages. Continued M&A activity and integration will likely sustain healthcare layoffs at elevated levels for the next several years.

Third, the transition from traditional retail to e-commerce remains incomplete. Major retailers continue operating brick-and-mortar footprints that are ultimately unsustainable, implying additional layoff waves as remaining chains optimize their store bases further. The recent stability in retail WARN filings may reflect that the worst has passed, but this remains uncertain.

On the positive side, unemployment remains low and job growth continues in healthcare, education, professional services, and construction. The state's agricultural and food processing sectors, while experiencing some displacement, remain fundamentally sound given continued global demand and Wisconsin's competitive advantages in dairy and specialty crops.

The policy imperative for Wisconsin is clear: the state must accelerate retraining and workforce development in advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and digital skills to enable workers displaced from traditional sectors to transition into sustainable employment. The concentration of layoffs among large employers filing WARN notices provides opportunity for rapid intervention—workforce development systems can target affected workers immediately upon notification rather than waiting for unemployment to appear in broader labor statistics. Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development should leverage WARN data more aggressively to proactively engage displaced workers and connect them with training, relocation, and job placement resources before unemployment becomes protracted.