WARN Act

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires US employers with 100 or more staff to give 60 days' notice before mass layoffs affecting 50 or more workers at one site, or before a plant closure. Congress passed it in 1988 under President Reagan, when large-scale job losses meant factory and plant shutdowns rather than software companies cutting headcount across dozens of remote offices.

The Act's structural limits have become central to the AI-era layoffs story: it counts workers by physical site, excludes part-timers from the threshold, and allows an 'unforeseen business circumstances' exemption employers can invoke to avoid triggering notice even during large restructurings . None of these provisions anticipated distributed, remote-heavy workforces, which is why companies spreading cuts across many small offices can lawfully avoid filing at all.

state legislatures, not Congress, have led the response: New York now requires AI-attribution disclosure in mass layoff notices, and California and Colorado have each tried tougher versions with mixed legal survival . No federal enforcement action against an AI-era employer had been recorded as of mid-2026, even after ServiceNow's unnotified June cuts joined the pattern .