Their description here is misleading. Even if the employer is large enough to be covered, WARN act requirements only apply to "plant closings" where some particular site is shut down or "mass layoffs" which have to include either 33% of the people at a site with 150+ people or 500 people overall.

Their detailed worker guide makes this clearer: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...

WARN was written before remote work was common. I'm very curious to see how WARN is interpreted by the courts for remote workers. There is no case law as far as I know, and a quick ctrl-f of that DoL PDF for "remote" has no results.

For example, is each remote worker considered to be working at a different "plant" (their home)? If so, it seems like the WARN act could never be triggered for remote workers. So a loophole is that fully remote workers don't get WARN protections. That seems to clearly violate the intent of the law, which is that reasonably-large businesses should give advance warning of layoffs.

Or, are all the remote workers collectively considered to be working at one "remote plant"? In that case, WARN would be triggered if a company of, say, 20k people lays off as few as 3 remote workers in each state. That seems silly also.

What about hybrid workers, where 1000 people "report to" or are "based at" one office, but nobody ever actually shows up (or maybe they do, but only for team-building exercises twice a year)? Are those workers truly "working at" that office site (and thus covered by WARN), or are they working at 1000 independent sites (and thus not covered)?

They pay out 60 days of notification pay in their severance packages and still don't notify. Technically, you can refuse that and I would guess that you would remain a worker who isn't allowed in the office.

>> to provide at least 60 calendar days advance written notice of a plant closing and mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment.

This doesn't seem to apply to selectively letting ~250 people go globally; I saw no mention of a specific US office of this size being shuttered.