Illinois employers announced more than 1,100 layoffs in May as part of planned “mass layoffs,” the most in any month so far this year, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act Report from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Employers are required to file with the state for the WARN Report each month, giving 60 days’ notice of mass layoffs at single employment sites.
The state’s May WARN Report announced 1,149 layoffs, all of them permanent, most of them in the Chicago area.
That’s the most of any month this year in Illinois, with a total of 2,913 layoffs announced by the WARN Report so far this year through the end of May.
While the 1,149 layoffs announced in May are less than half of the 2,480 layoffs reported in May of 2021, and only about 15% of the more than 7,500 layoffs announced in May of 2020, the most recent monthly mass layoffs still outpace pre-pandemic levels in May of 2018 and 2019.
The WARN Report announced only 543 monthly layoffs in May 2019 and 952 in May 2018.
However, for both of those years, overall mass layoffs for the first five months of the year far outpaced this year’s mass layoffs in Illinois. Through the end of May 2019, the WARN Report announced 6,329 layoffs in Illinois for the year up to that point, and through the end of May 2019, the WARN Report announced 7,530 layoffs for the year.
The 2,913 layoffs announced so far this year in Illinois are the lowest for the first five months of the year in the past five years.
The May 2022 layoffs included 247 at a dairy plant in McHenry County. According to published reports, that dairy facility plans to close on July 9.
The latest layoffs in the WARN Report also include 128 layoffs at the Whole Foods grocery store at the DePaul University Welcome Center at 959 W. Fullerton Ave. in Lincoln Park.
Whole Foods announced in April that it was closing six out of its more than 530 locations nationwide, including the DePaul location and the store at 63rd and Halsted in Englewood.
The state’s May WARN Report does not include any layoff notices for the Whole Foods store in Englewood.
When Whole Foods announced the store closures in April, it said it expected all interested and eligible employees at the closing stores would be able to find positions at other locations if they wanted.
