Layoff Early Warning — WARN Act Filings, Watchlisted

US federal law (the WARN Act) requires employers above a size threshold to file a public notice 60 days before a mass layoff or plant closure. There's no single federal feed for this — every state publishes its own filings, in its own format, and nobody aggregates them cleanly. Recruiters, journalists, and PE/VC diligence teams currently check this by hand, state by state.

This starts with the two states that publish real structured data — CA (a live XLSX report, updated twice weekly) and TX (a clean Socrata JSON API) — matched against a company watchlist, ranked by headcount severity.

Coverage — honest, not a 50-state promise

Only CA and TX have live adapters right now. Most other states require a public-records request or publish only as unstructured PDF — genuinely not automatable the way these two are. Built as one adapter per state, so adding a state later is a contained addition, not a rewrite. Treat a "clear" result as "clear in CA/TX," not "clear everywhere."

Input

{ "watchlist": ["Genentech", "JPMorgan Chase"], "states": ["CA", "TX"] }

Leave watchlist empty to return every current filing instead of matching against specific companies.

Sample output

{
  "state": "CA",
  "company": "Genentech, Inc.",
  "county": "San Mateo County",
  "noticeDate": "2026-06-26",
  "effectiveDate": "2026-07-29",
  "layoffType": "Layoff Permanent",
  "employeeCount": 103,
  "severity": "significant",
  "matchedWatchlistEntry": "Genentech",
  "industry": "54 Professional Scientific and Technical Services"
}

Typical uses

• Recruiter early-warning — watch specific companies for layoff signals before they hit the news.
• Journalism / research — track layoff activity across CA and TX without checking two separate state government sites by hand.
• PE/VC diligence — check a target or portfolio company for recent WARN filings before a deal.

Pricing

$3.00 / 1,000 results ($0.003 per filing).

⚠️ Read before you act

• Coverage is CA + TX only. This is stated plainly because a "no results" answer for a company outside these two states means nothing — it wasn't checked, not confirmed clean.
• Company matching is word-boundary, not substring — "Chase" won't false-positive-match every company with "purchase" in an address field; "JPMorgan Chase" requires both words present.
• Re-run periodically. New filings post continuously (CA updates twice weekly); this is a point-in-time snapshot.

FAQ

• Why only CA and TX? They're the two states that publish genuinely structured, live data (an XLSX report and a Socrata JSON API, respectively) rather than requiring a public-records request or only offering unstructured PDFs.
• What does severity mean? A headcount-based tier (major ≥500, significant ≥100, notable ≥25, small below) — the buyer's real question is "how big a deal is this," not just "did it happen."
• Can more states be added? Yes — the adapter pattern is designed for it. It's a matter of finding each state's actual data source, which varies widely in quality and format.

Related actors

• OT/ICS Advisory Matcher — the same official-feed-matched-against- your-list pattern, for security advisories instead of layoff filings.
• SEC EDGAR Filings — another public, legally-required-disclosure actor, for material corporate events.