New York Labor Disruption: 2025 WARN Filings Meet BLS Projections

New York produced two very different pictures of labor disruption in 2025, depending on which data you read. The WARN record — the layoff notices employers are legally required to file — shows 623 events affecting 21,461 workers, the second-most filings of any state in the country, driven hardest by a single autumn wave of ground-transportation closures. The federal occupational projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics describe something else entirely: the jobs the state is structurally projected to lose over the coming years are concentrated in printing, sewing, paper goods, and other machine-operator trades that scarcely surface in the year's filings at all. This piece reads the two signals side by side and asks what the distance between them reveals about how labor disruption actually arrives.

The two datasets are not interchangeable, and the comparison only works if that is clear from the start. Layoff figures here come from LayoffTracker.us, which compiles records exclusively from state WARN Act filings, current as of an August 2026 snapshot covering 2025 in full. The occupational projections come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET; New York's run through 2032, and a separate national growth ranking runs through 2034. A WARN filing is an acute event — a specific employer cutting a specific site on a specific date. A BLS projection is a structural forecast — the slow expected drift of an occupation's total employment. One is a flow of notices; the other is a multi-year trend line. Reading them together is useful precisely because they measure different things.

The acute signal: New York's 2025 WARN filings

By the WARN record, 2025 was a heavy year for New York. The state logged 623 layoff events affecting 21,461 workers across 191 companies — the second-highest event count in the nation, behind only California's 1,691. By affected-worker count, though, New York ranks fourth, behind California, Washington, and Texas. That combination says something about the shape of its filings: at roughly 34 workers per event, New York's notices are smaller on average than the national figure of about 80 per event. (Read that national comparison loosely — it averages across states whose WARN reporting is not uniform; see the Methodology section.)

Two terms have to stay separate here. An event is a single WARN filing; the affected-worker count is the headcount attached to it. They move independently, and in 2025 they came apart sharply. New York's busiest month for filings was June, with 228 events — more than a third of the year's total — carrying 4,624 workers. October ran the opposite way: just 34 filings, but 3,713 affected workers — the year's second-highest monthly headcount, from one of its quieter months for notices. September inverted it again, with 136 filings covering only 1,672 workers. The count of notices and the count of people are different measurements, and this year they told different stories month to month.

That October concentration is the year's most distinct pattern, and it is unusually legible at the filing level. Six of the year's largest notices name companies whose line of business is evident from the name itself — bus and ground-transportation operators — and all six carry the same layoff date of October 31 with notices filed October 20: Pride Transportation Services in Brooklyn (885 workers) and Mt Vernon (832), L&M Bus Corp in Brooklyn (395), Penny Transportation in Brooklyn (145), Bobby's Bus Co. in Jamaica (113), and IC Coachways on Staten Island (103). Together those six filings account for 2,473 of October's 3,713 affected workers — about two-thirds of the month from six notices. A seventh Brooklyn filing, Total Maintenance Corp (104), carries the identical pair of dates.

Geographically, the filings concentrate in the five boroughs. New York City proper (4,621 affected across 113 events), Brooklyn (3,723 across 94), and the Bronx (613 across 60) together account for roughly 42% of the state's affected workers. Outside the city, the year's largest single filings were a Woodbury closure by Cold Spring Acquisition (490), a Chester closure by Amscan Inc., a Party City Holdings affiliate (471), a Frito-Lay closure in Liberty (287), and a Plug Power layoff in Slingerlands (278). The two largest filings recorded under the New York City label itself ran through finance and media: Goldman, Sachs & Co. (343) and Paramount Global (244).

Treat the city-level detail as directional, not exact. City names are raw entries from individual WARN filings and carry the usual noise — the data spreads across 206 distinct city labels for New York in 2025, and the same place can appear under more than one spelling (the Pride Transportation filing above is recorded under "Mt Vernon," while the city rollup reads "Mt. Vernon"). In this year's data, several small-town totals that look anomalous turn out to be single large employers rather than artifacts: Mt. Vernon's 865 affected workers across three events, Chester's 552 across two, and Woodbury's 490 from one filing each trace to the closures named above. The broad pattern — heavy New York City concentration, with a handful of large suburban and upstate closures — is reliable; the precise ordering below the top few is not. One date caveat also applies: where a notice did not record a precise layoff date, the dataset uses a year-end sentinel of December 31. The Children's Village closure in Valhalla (114 workers) is flagged that way, so it should be read as reported through year-end 2025, not as a literal December 31 event.

The structural signal: what BLS projects New York to lose

Set the filings aside and look at where federal projections say New York's occupational employment is actually shrinking, and an entirely different list appears. Every one of the state's ten fastest-declining occupations through 2032 is a production or machine-operator trade, each carrying a "Below Average" outlook and each projected to lose between 17% and 24% of its New York employment:

Rank	Occupation	2032 change	Employment
1	Chemical Plant and System Operators	−24%	450 → 340
2	Cutters and Trimmers, Hand	−23%	480 → 370
2	Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders	−23%	3,260 → 2,500
4	Adhesive Bonding Machine Operators and Tenders	−21%	340 → 270
4	Extruding and Forming Machine Setters (Synthetic and Glass Fibers)	−21%	340 → 270
4	Textile Knitting and Weaving Machine Setters	−21%	330 → 260
7	Sewing Machine Operators	−19%	6,850 → 5,560
8	Print Binding and Finishing Workers	−18%	910 → 750
9	Printing Press Operators	−17%	7,450 → 6,190
9	Woodworking Machine Setters (Except Sawing)	−17%	1,670 → 1,390

Three of these are large enough in absolute terms to anchor the point. Sewing Machine Operators — who "operate or tend sewing machines … in the manufacture of garment or nongarment products" — carry the biggest raw loss, about 1,290 New York jobs, at a state median wage of $38,480 and no formal credential required. Printing Press Operators, who "set up and operate digital, letterpress, lithographic, flexographic, gravure, or other printing machines," lose roughly 1,260 jobs from a larger base of 7,450; it is steady, decently paid work, with a New York median of $47,860 against a national median of $45,780, reaching $69,880 at the state's 90th percentile, entered with a high-school diploma. Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders — who tend machines that convert, corrugate, band, box, or seal paperboard — are the steepest of the three at −23%, shedding about 760 of 3,260 jobs, and the best paid: a New York median of $52,800, above the $50,270 national median, again on a high-school-diploma entry path.

These are not collapsing industries having a dramatic year. They are trades eroding steadily and predictably — a fifth or more of the jobs draining away over the better part of a decade. That distinction is what makes the comparison worth drawing.

Where the two signals meet — and mostly don't

Here is the collision, and it is largely a divergence. The workforces driving New York's 2025 WARN record and the occupations BLS projects New York to lose are, with few exceptions, not the same workforces.

The loudest filing activity ran through ground transportation (the October bus cluster, plus MV Transportation's February notices in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Harlem totaling 565 workers across three filings), security services (Mulligan Security, 409 in Brooklyn and 111 in Manhattan), finance and media (Goldman Sachs, Paramount Global), health and home care (Rapid Reliable Care by DocGo, 183; Atria Home Care, 161; Island Peer Review Org, 161), food service (Compass Group USA, 192; Whitsons Food Service, 141), and retail and logistics (Rite Aid's Liverpool closure, 233; King Delivery, 200; Exel, 116). None of those lines of business map onto printing, sewing, paper goods, textiles, or woodworking.

A minority of the fifty largest filings are evidently production or manufacturing sites — Frito-Lay in Liberty (287), Poly-Pak Industries Group in Melville (146), Semikron Danfoss in Marcy (117), Crucible Industries in Solvay (158). But this is exactly where the comparison has to stop short, and it is worth being precise about why. WARN filings record no occupational detail whatsoever. They name an employer, a site, a date, and a headcount — not the jobs held by the people affected. So even a filing at a plainly industrial site cannot be matched to a BLS occupation without inference the data does not support. The two sources share no join key, and manufacturing a tighter overlap than that would mean inventing one.

What can be said holds at the level of pattern rather than category. The WARN record is triggered by large, sudden, single-site cuts — a bus operator ending a contract, a plant closing on a date certain. A trade that sheds a fifth of its workforce over eight years rarely moves that way; it fades through small shops not replacing retirees, a press decommissioned here, a line not restarted there — attrition that mostly falls below WARN thresholds and never generates a filing at all. An occupation can therefore be in steep structural decline and leave almost no footprint in the layoff record. Conversely, a Manhattan bank trimming a division or a transit contractor losing a route can dominate a month's filings while signaling nothing about any occupation's long-run trajectory.

It would be a mistake to read either signal as the cause or the leading indicator of the other; the data supports describing the relationship, not a mechanism. The narrower and more useful conclusion: in New York, the layoffs you can count this year and the occupations the state is projected to lose are largely separate phenomena, and a labor-market picture built on only one of them would miss most of the other. The WARN record captures the shocks; the projections capture the erosion. (This reading rests on the fifty largest filings by headcount, not on all 623 — a smaller printing, textile, or paper-goods filing could sit further down the list.)

Where a declining trade's skills go

A structural decline is only half a story if it stops at the loss. So take Paper Goods Machine Setters — the steepest of New York's three largest declining trades — and ask where those skills actually transfer. The occupational-adjacency data returns 502 related occupations ranked by skill overlap; among the ten nearest, the news is genuinely hard. The closest matches are Textile Bleaching and Dyeing Machine Operators (90.6% skill match), Extruding and Forming Machine Setters (89.3%), Grinding and Polishing Workers (88.2%), and Cutting and Slicing Machine Operators (87.5%). Four of those ten nearest neighbors — extruding and forming, textile knitting and weaving, printing press operators, and print binding — sit on the very same New York decline list. And not one of the ten appears on the national fastest-growing report; the tool returns no fast-growing adjacent occupation for this trade at all. The skills are real and transferable, but the immediate neighborhood is shrinking with it.

The neighboring trade tells a better story, and the contrast is the finding. Run the same analysis from Printing Press Operators (483 related occupations) and one destination among the ten nearest breaks the pattern: Semiconductor Processing Technicians, an 84.3% skill match, carrying a Bright Outlook flag and appearing on the national fastest-growing list through 2034. It asks the same high-school-diploma entry point, pays a New York range of roughly $48,830–$58,710 against the press operator's $47,860 median, and the gap analysis is encouraging: five skill areas already match, with two flagged to develop — and training is available for both. A second adjacent role, Electrical and Electronic Equipment Assemblers (83.6%), also carries a Bright Outlook, though it does not make the fastest-growing list.

Two honest caveats belong on that pivot. The fastest-growing flag is a national signal — it does not certify that semiconductor work is growing in New York specifically. And these are the ten nearest matches by skill overlap out of several hundred; a wider search would surface more distant but potentially better destinations. Still, the shape of it is clear enough. A press operator's skills do not strand them, but the paths that genuinely grow are a deliberate step sideways into electronics and semiconductor work rather than a lateral move within print and paper — and for the paper-goods operator, even that sideways step is one occupation further away. Naming that completes the picture rather than softening the decline.

Methodology

Layoff data in this article is drawn from LayoffTracker.us, which compiles records from publicly filed state WARN Act notices. The dataset is limited to events that meet WARN thresholds and excludes states without public WARN disclosure (Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Wyoming); Oklahoma reports events without affected-employee counts, so national and cross-state totals — including the per-event comparison above — reflect only the states that publish and should be read as a floor on total U.S. activity. New York itself reports both events and headcount. Every record is sourced from a state WARN filing; the dataset does not incorporate company press releases or news reports. Industry classification across the dataset is still being enriched, which is why this article identifies filings by company name and evident line of business rather than by industry aggregation. Layoff figures are current as of the data snapshot dated August 5, 2026. For the full layoff-data methodology, see https://www.layofftracker.us/methodology.

Occupational projections and wages come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET. New York's occupational employment projections run through 2032; the national fastest-growing ranking used in the skills section runs through 2034; wage figures are medians from the OEWS program, retrieved August 2026. The WARN record and the BLS projections measure different things — a count of formal layoff notices versus a long-run forecast of occupational employment — and this article compares them without treating either as a proxy or a cause of the other.