Texas employers have laid off close to 6,800 workers so far this year – fewer than half the number sent packing in pre-pandemic 2019, according to notices filed with the Texas Workforce Commission.
The notices are required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a 1988 law requiring companies with 100 or more employees to provide a 60-day warning of closings or mass layoffs. It’s intended to give employees time to potentially find new work or train for new positions.
This year’s single biggest layoff came in August when Michigan-based Home Point Financial Corp. told 526 workers affiliated with its Farmers Branch office that they would be terminated beginning Nov. 1. Home Point added 49 more layoffs to the total this month. Mortgage companies have been particularly hard hit this year by a huge drop in demand for home loans caused by higher interest rates.
Here are the Texas employers filing WARN notices so far this year.
But a strong labor market in Texas has kept this year’s mass layoffs well below pre-pandemic 2019 and the last two years when the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread job losses. In 2019, Texas employers filed WARN notices eliminating 14,553 jobs – more than twice this year’s total with a month left in the year. The pandemic high came in 2020, when WARN notice filings exceeded 91,000 jobs.
WARN notices, however, don’t include all job cuts made by Texas companies.
Coppell-based mortgage lender Mr. Cooper, for example, recently announced a layoff affecting 800 workers in its origination business. Many of the job cuts were in Chandler, Ariz. Earlier this month, Dallas-based Builders FirstSource, the largest supplier of materials to homebuilders in the U.S., told investors that it cut 2,600 jobs nationwide in response to this year’s decline in new home construction.
Nationally, employers have announced plans this year to cut 320,173 jobs, a 6% increase over the same 11-month period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The year-to-date total is the second lowest on record, since the firm began tracking job cuts in 1993. The lowest total came in the same period last year.
Job-cutting, however, has accelerated in November when U.S. companies eliminated 76,835 jobs – a 127% increase from October and a 417% spike from the same month last year.
Despite the layoffs, Texas has more people working than ever before, and Dallas-Fort Worth added 255,000 jobs in the last 12 months — roughly two-and-a-half times the usual pace. Only New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest markets, had more job gains.
Yet Texas employers are still clamoring for more help. In September, Texas had nearly 1.03 million job openings, the most ever and nearly twice the number before the pandemic, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That translates into almost 1.8 openings for every unemployed Texan.
Dallas-Fort Worth set a new high for total employment in October with nearly 4.19 million workers. The region grew jobs by 6.5% over the past 12 months, almost double the U.S. job growth rate of 3.4% and highest among the most populous metros.
The healthy Texas labor market led one website to describe it as the state where workers are the 2nd least likely in the nation to lose their jobs. Hire A Helper said it ranked states based on average monthly discharge rates calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
