Washington Labor Disruption: 2025 WARN Filings Meet BLS Projections

On paper, 2025 was Washington's worst year for layoffs since the pandemic. The state's WARN record — the layoff notices employers must file before mass job cuts — shows 120 events affecting 30,707 workers, nearly triple 2024's total and the second-highest headcount of any state in the country. But almost half of those workers come from a single wave of autumn notices from central-Washington apple and tree-fruit operations. The filings themselves explain the wave. Every agricultural notice with a readable document describes an end-of-harvest seasonal layoff, often the scheduled expiration of H-2A farmworker contracts. Employers say they are reporting these layoffs only because Washington's new state WARN law now requires it. As one grower put it, "The only change in this process from previous seasons is a new requirement from the State of Washington." The federal occupational projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, point at a different set of workforces entirely — fishing, logging, clerical, and print trades. This piece reads the two signals side by side and asks what the gap between them reveals.

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 October 2026 snapshot that covers 2025 in full. We also read the original filing documents where they were available to us: 49 of the year's 120 filings. Several passages below quote what employers told the state. The occupational projections come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET; Washington'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. Reading them together is useful precisely because they measure different things.

The acute signal: Washington's 2025 WARN filings

By the WARN record, Washington logged 120 layoff events affecting 30,707 workers across 100 companies in 2025. Only California (97,751) recorded more affected workers; by event count, Washington ranks ninth. That combination describes the shape of its filings: at roughly 256 workers per event, Washington's notices ran about three times the national figure of roughly 80 per event. (Treat that national comparison loosely, since it averages across states whose WARN reporting is not uniform; see the Methodology section.) Washington accounted for about 7.5% of all affected workers nationally from about 2.3% of the events.

The year-over-year jump is steep. Washington's affected-worker count rose 197% from 2024's 10,336, and its event count rose 88% from 64. In the state's six-year series, only 2020 (47,557 workers) was higher. On its face that reads as a sharp deterioration. The monthly record shows where it came from:

Month	Events	Affected workers
January	5	2,683
May	6	1,221
July	11	2,496
August	10	1,950
October	18	2,094
November	33	15,255
December	13	2,553

Selected months; the remaining five months each recorded fewer than 1,100 affected workers.

November alone carried half the year's affected workers: 15,255 of 30,707, from 33 filings. In 2024, Washington's November recorded 920 affected workers; in 2023, 135. Whatever happened in November 2025, it has no precedent in the state's recent WARN record.

The November wave: orchards, harvest, and a new law

At the filing level, the November wave is unusually easy to read. Nineteen of the state's 2025 filings come from agricultural employers, identifiable by company name or by the filing document itself. Together they total 14,789 affected workers, about 48% of the year. Seventeen of them carry November layoff dates and account for about 93% of the month's headcount. The largest:

• Gebbers Farms in Brewster: 3,465 workers, the state's single largest filing of the year
• Stemilt Ag Services in Wenatchee: 1,561
• Agrimacs Inc in Chelan: 1,368
• AG Management Group in Yakima: 1,276
• FirstFruits LLC in Prescott: 1,200
• Borton & Sons at various Washington locations: 1,025
• Columbia Orchard Management in Wenatchee: 898
• Gilbert Orchards in Yakima: 599
• Kershaw Farm Labor Management in Yakima: 539

All were noticed between mid-September and mid-October, with layoff dates from November 7 to mid-December.

The filing documents explain the timing in the employers' own words. Seventeen of the nineteen agricultural notices have a readable document, covering 11,127 workers, and every one of them describes an end-of-season layoff. Seven say explicitly that the workers are H-2A contract workers. A few examples:

• FirstFruits told its orchard harvest employees the notice covered "the annual end of apple harvest seasonal layoff," one that "follows the historical seasonal layoff that occurs in the industry every year."
• Stemilt Ag Services wrote that it "conducts annual layoffs following the end of harvest and/or expiration of H2A contracts."
• Kershaw Farm Labor Management wrote that "Layoffs in the month of November are not due to closure nor are they new to this company or the agricultural industry as a whole."
• Gilbert Orchards and Sundquist Fruit described "end of H-2A contract work due to seasonal harvest completion."
• NWFM gave "our standard end of harvest season" as the reason.
• Agrimacs, whose 1,368 affected workers are all listed as "Farmworker," wrote that "this work is seasonal and traditionally ends each year around this time."

Several of the employers say outright why these routine layoffs appear in the WARN record at all. FirstFruits: "The only change in this process from previous seasons is a new requirement from the State of Washington that employers provide written notice in advance of an anticipated layoff." Agrimacs said it was filing "in compliance with a new Washington state law (ESSB 5525)." Columbia Orchard Management wrote that it was filing "to comply with the new WA state WARN Act to report our normal end of season layoff of seasonal orchard workers … as a precaution in the absence of regulatory guidance." Borton & Sons wrote that it did "not believe a notice should be required for H-2A workers, as their work eligibility ends," but was filing "in an abundance of caution." NWFM described its notice as "voluntarily and proactively" provided. Several growers argued that the law's exemptions might apply to them, and filed anyway.

That changes how the year should be read. A large share of Washington's 2025 headcount reflects what the WARN record began capturing, not necessarily a change in how many people lost work. The harvest layoffs these employers describe as annual entered the record in 2025, apparently for the first time, because employers chose to report them under a new state law.

Two cautions apply. First, the WARN record codes all but one of these filings as "Layoff/Permanent"; only Washington Orchard Management's is coded temporary. The documents tell a different story:

• Eleven of the seventeen describe the layoff as temporary, seasonal, or permanent only for the current season. FirstFruits wrote plainly that "The layoff is temporary, with employment opportunities starting again between December 2025 to early spring of 2026." Kershaw anticipates "it will not be permanent." Columbia expects "hiring for the new season expected to begin in mid-February 2026."
• The filings that do say "permanent" usually explain why. Stemilt can't "identify a specific recall date, nor can we guarantee the approval of any future H2A contracts." NWFM says former employees "are not automatically recalled."

The coded type reflects how each employer chose to file, not a measured outcome.

Second, two agricultural filings could not be checked against their own documents:

• Gebbers Farms, the year's largest filing: the document attached to it in the state's own WARN database is another grower's notice, so its 3,465 count and its reason are unconfirmed.
• Double M Orchards (197 workers): no copy of its document was available.

The seasonal description in this article rests on the seventeen documents we read.

The rest of the year: aerospace, software, retail

Set the orchards aside and a more familiar Puget Sound pattern remains, spread across the calendar:

• Boeing's two statewide filings (2,192 workers in January and 396 in February, both noticed in late 2024) account for most of January's total.
• Microsoft filed five notices for 3,202 workers in Redmond and Bellevue. The three largest were 1,985 in July, 830 in August, and 305 in August, followed by 40 in October and 42 in November.
• Starbucks filed three notices for 1,924 workers. They are two different kinds of action:
  • The largest (974 workers, Seattle and Kent) is a "reduction in force" rather than a closure. Its job-title table is led by 194 district managers, followed by Siren Retail baristas and operations leads and 39 project specialists. The filing notes that "Some positions will be contracted out."
  • A separate notice (338 workers) covers the closure of a group of Washington stores, which the filing says "is expected to be permanent," with "some employees … offered transfers to other Starbucks Stores in the area."
• Fred Meyer closed five stores (Tacoma, Seattle, Redmond, Everett, and Kent) for 982 workers between late September and mid-October.
• Smaller notices came from Oracle, T-Mobile, FIS, Rec Room, and Warner Bros. Discovery in the Seattle area, along with Cornish College of the Arts' Seattle closure (354), REC Silicon's Moses Lake closure (224), and health-care layoffs at Incyte Diagnostics (310), PeaceHealth (241), Seattle Children's Hospital (154), and Providence (126).

All five Microsoft notices give the same one-line explanation: Microsoft "has decided to reorganize and restructure operations." Each says the cuts are "expected to be permanent" and that "The identified facilities will not be closed." Each also splits the total between positions at Puget Sound facilities and "remote positions located within Puget Sound." Of the July notice's 1,985, for example, 475 were remote; across all five, 777 of 3,202 were remote. The letters give no further reason. The Boeing filings are also among the year's largest, but no filing documents are on record for them, so this article does not characterize what drove them.

Where the autumn documents do state a reason, they show a range of pressures beyond agriculture:

• Purelight Power (71 workers), a solar installer, wrote that it was shutting down nationwide and filing for Chapter 7 liquidation. It blamed the federal "One Big Beautiful Bill," which it said "dramatically cut solar energy tax credits," and added: "Simply put, the Company is out of time and out of money."
• Tessera furloughed 85 janitorial workers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord because "the recent government shutdown has resulted in a lapse in Army funding for janitorial services." The furlough was expected to last until Congress restored funding.
• Battelle, which operates the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, cut 68 positions, citing "funding uncertainties and evolving federal mission priorities."
• JARDE LLC, an Amazon delivery contractor, closed after what it called "an unforeseen and unexpected termination of our service contract by Amazon Logistics."
• PacificSource cited "a significant loss of Medicaid membership in Lane County Oregon."
• Meta's December notice for about 101 employees gives no reason. Its position table is dominated by software engineering roles.

Geographically, the two halves of the year sit in two different Washingtons. Brewster (3,465 workers from one filing), Yakima (2,612 across four), Wenatchee (2,459 across two), Chelan (1,368), and Prescott (1,200) are orchard towns. Redmond (3,070 across eight events) and Seattle (2,088 across 19, the most filings of any city) carry the corporate cuts. Treat the city-level detail as directional, not exact. City names are raw entries from individual WARN filings, and the largest "city" in Washington's 2025 data is the placeholder "Various locations in Washington" (5,683 workers across 17 events), with combined entries such as "Redmond and Bellevue" and "Seattle, Kent" listed separately from their component cities. 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. Inventprise's Redmond layoff (150 workers) is flagged that way, so read it as reported through year-end 2025.

The structural signal: what BLS projects Washington to lose

Federal projections tell a different story about where Washington's occupational employment is shrinking. The state's ten fastest-declining occupations through 2032 are a mix of resource extraction, clerical, and print and media work, each carrying a "Below Average" outlook:

Rank	Occupation	2032 change	Employment	WA median pay
1	Fishing and Hunting Workers	−27%	2,030 → 1,480	not reported
2	Cutters and Trimmers, Hand	−25%	40 → 30	$35,960
3	Word Processors and Typists	−17%	230 → 190	$46,110
4	Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service	−15%	800 → 680	$47,800
5	Fallers	−13%	450 → 390	$77,340
6	Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters (Metal and Plastic)	−12%	1,040 → 920	$47,230
6	News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists	−12%	1,070 → 940	$54,760
6	Prepress Technicians and Workers	−12%	520 → 460	$53,770
9	Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand	−10%	210 → 190	$47,290
9	Logging Workers, All Other	−10%	1,110 → 1,000	$67,650

Three of the ten come from the state's fishing and timber economy. Fishing and Hunting Workers top the list with the largest raw loss, about 550 jobs. Fallers, who "use axes or chainsaws to fell trees," stand out for pay: Washington's median of $77,340 is far above the $52,100 national median and reaches $115,940 at the state's 90th percentile, on a high-school-diploma entry path. Further down the list, Logging Equipment Operators (−5%, 2,970 → 2,830) continue the theme. The clerical and print entries (typists, switchboard operators, prepress) are small in absolute terms and part of a long national pattern; journalists, at −12% from a base of 1,070, are the one degree-level occupation in the top ten.

As in other states, these are not industries having a dramatic year. They are trades eroding slowly, losing a tenth to a quarter of their jobs over most of a decade.

Where the two signals meet, and mostly don't

The collision is mostly a divergence, but Washington's version has a twist: here the loudest WARN signal is partly a product of what the law newly asked employers to report, rather than of where jobs are disappearing.

Agriculture. Unusually, some of these filings say which jobs are affected. Agrimacs' notice lists its affected workers as "Farmworker." Washington Orchard Management's lists seasonal general laborers, crew leaders, equipment operators, and harvest checkers. Most others describe "General Field Labor" under H-2A. That points to a single BLS occupation, Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse, whose O*NET description is to "plant, cultivate, and harvest vegetables, fruits, nuts" and to clean, grade, sort, and pack harvested products. BLS gives that occupation a "Below Average" outlook in Washington, with a state median of $39,170 against $35,660 nationally. But it does not appear among Washington's 50 fastest-declining occupations, a list that reaches down to occupations projected to shrink just 1%. The closest agricultural entry is "Agricultural Workers, All Other," at −3%. So the year's largest block of WARN headcount involves an occupation BLS does not project to contract sharply. By the employers' own accounts, these layoffs are the predictable end of a season, with rehiring expected the next spring.

Technology. Technology filings run the other way. Washington's software sector produced some of the year's largest notices, and the documents that list positions show software engineers among those cut: 41 "Software Engineering" positions in Meta's notice and 11 "Software Engineer" positions in Battelle's. Yet Software Developers carry a "Bright" outlook in Washington, flagged for both Rapid Growth and Numerous Job Openings, with a state median of $166,540. Microsoft's October notice lists 7 software engineering roles among its 40 positions. The copies of its three large notices available for this review are cover letters without their job-title attachments, so nothing here says which roles those cut. What the record does show is acute cuts within an occupation BLS still projects to grow. A WARN notice records a specific employer's decision; it does not, by itself, signal an occupation's long-run trajectory.

Timber, fishing, clerical, print. Going the other direction, the occupations BLS projects Washington to lose fastest barely appear among the year's fifty largest filings. There are no evident logging, sawmill, or fishing operations among them. Two closures sit near the manufacturing trades on the decline list: REC Silicon's Moses Lake site and Associated Materials in Fife (150). As elsewhere, though, WARN records carry no occupational codes, so matching a plant closure to a specific BLS occupation would require inference the data does not support.

The pattern behind all three is the same mechanism seen in other states, made unusually visible. The WARN record captures large, single-site, dated events: a store closing, a division cut, and now in Washington a harvest contract ending. An occupation that loses a quarter of its jobs over eight years mostly fades through attrition that never crosses a WARN threshold. That is why the fallers and fishing crews BLS expects to lose leave little trace in the filings. Conversely, a layoff the industry describes as recurring every year can dominate a state's annual WARN total once the law brings it into view. Neither signal leads or causes the other; they are measuring different things. Washington's 2025 headcount should be compared with earlier years only after accounting for the harvest notices. (This reading rests on the fifty largest filings by headcount, not on all 120; a smaller logging, fishing, or print filing could sit further down the list.)

Where a declining trade's skills go

A structural decline is only half the story if it stops at the loss. Take Fallers, the best-paid occupation on Washington's decline list, and ask where those skills transfer. The occupational-adjacency data returns 410 related occupations ranked by skill overlap. Among the ten nearest, the picture is mixed:

• Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators is the closest match (85.3%) and carries a Bright Outlook, with a Washington wage range of $46,460–$56,760.
• Logging Equipment Operators (81.8%, $65,430–$77,480) pay closer to a faller's wage but sit on the same decline list, at −5%.
• Tree Trimmers and Pruners (81.7%, $48,940–$79,680) is the adjacent role whose upper range comes closest to a faller's median. The analysis returns no fast-growing adjacent occupation for fallers, so this reflects pay overlap, not a growth signal.

None of the ten appears on the national fastest-growing list through 2034. A faller's skills carry over, but in Washington the nearest moves mostly mean lower pay or staying in a shrinking trade.

The occupation behind the November filings tells a similar story at a lower wage. Starting from Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse (440 related occupations), the nearest matches are weaker, at about 70% skill overlap, and none is on the national fastest-growing list:

• Tree Trimmers and Pruners (72.5%) again, at $48,940–$79,680.
• Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals (72.1%), at $39,400–$55,570.
• Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers (70.8%, $43,000–$56,410), which carries a Bright Outlook.
• Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand (70.8%, $40,300–$51,230), which also carries a Bright Outlook.

Each of those ranges starts above the farmworker's $39,170 state median.

Two caveats belong on both pivots. The Bright Outlook and fastest-growing signals describe occupations, not openings in a specific Washington town. These are the ten nearest matches out of several hundred, and a wider search would surface more distant destinations. And for the orchard workers, the filings themselves suggest the more immediate path for many is the next season, not a new occupation.

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. Washington 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, evident line of business, and filing text rather than by industry aggregation. All state and monthly totals come from LayoffTracker's pre-computed analytics; subtotals for named filings are sums of those individual records. Layoff figures are current as of the data snapshot dated October 17, 2026. For the full layoff-data methodology, see https://www.layofftracker.us/methodology.

Quotations from employers come from the original filing documents submitted to Washington's Employment Security Department. LayoffTracker's 2025 record links a filing document for 53 of Washington's 120 filings. Washington may attach documents to more filings than that, so the documents reviewed here may not be a complete set. We read 49 in full, including image-only scans, which were read page by page. Three documents were unavailable (Double M Orchards, Infineon Technologies, and Darigold). The state's database attaches another employer's notice to the Gebbers Farms filing, so that record was not read. Stated reasons are the employers' own accounts, not independently verified causes.

The documents sometimes differ from the structured record. Some count different workforces:

• Farmers New World Life Insurance's notice lists 24 affected Washington employees, against 65 in the record.
• Inventprise's lists about 76, against 150.
• About 20 of Battelle's 68 positions are outside Washington.

Green Diamond Resource Company's notice, recorded as a layoff, describes moving 42 employees to an affiliate and says they "will not see any change in the terms and conditions of their employment."

These differences are small next to the state's totals and do not change the article's findings, but they are a reminder that a WARN record's headcount is the employer's filing figure, not an audited count. Comparisons between 2025 and earlier years should account for the employers' own statements that the harvest layoffs were newly reported under Washington's state WARN law.

Occupational projections and wages come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET. Washington's occupational employment projections run through 2032. The national fastest-growing ranking used in the skills section runs through 2034. State pay figures are OEWS medians, and destination pay in the skills section is the Washington wage range the adjacency tool reports; all were retrieved in October 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 for, or a cause of, the other.