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A decades-old set of laws is getting renewed interest thanks to the high-profile layoffs at Twitter and other major tech firms. The WARN Act, short for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, was enacted in 1988 to protect workers and communities from the economic turbulence that mass layoffs can cause without sufficient warning.
WARN violations aren’t common, says Karl Gerber, founder of Employment Lawyers Group in California, because “companies who usually violate them are on their way out”—generally meaning they go bankrupt after cutting jobs. But recent layoffs that may contravene the WARN Act have happened at hugely successful tech firms.
Five former employees of Twitter brought a class-action lawsuit against the company in early November, claiming Twitter violated the WARN Act when it laid off 50% of its workforce (3,700 employees) without the required 60-day warning.
Twitter isn’t the only company undergoing mass layoffs. So far in 2022, there have been nearly 140,000 people laid off from various tech companies, according to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi. In November alone, Amazon laid off 10,000 people, Meta laid off 11,000 and Carvana laid off 1,500 workers.
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