Thousands of Families Face Job Uncertainty as Holiday Season Nears

More than 4,900 workers in New Jersey have been named in recent state layoff notices with effective dates running from early October through the end of the year, according to filings published by the New Jersey Department of Labor. The notices, required under the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification rules, cover pharmaceutical companies, banks, food manufacturers, insurers, and other employers. For the people listed, the timing lands squarely in the months when many households plan for holidays, school breaks, and year-end expenses.

The filings are not a single event. They are a collection of separate company notices posted over several months and compiled in the state’s 2026 WARN archive. Among the larger counts with near-term effective dates are Novartis Pharmaceuticals in East Hanover (322 positions, effective October 2), Mars Wrigley in Newark (307 positions, October 16), Verizon’s corporate resources group in Basking Ridge (282 positions, October 16), and HelloFresh’s grocery-delivery operation in Swedesboro (374 positions, mid-November). Bristol Myers Squibb appears in multiple entries totaling several hundred positions across Lawrence Township and Princeton, with windows stretching into late 2026 and into 2027. Smaller notices include Samsung SDS America in Ridgefield Park (179), Sumitomo Mitsui Banking in Jersey City (75), Banker Steel in South Plainfield (115), Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods in Elmwood Park (168), and Accupac in Lakewood (260), among others.

Hudson County is on the list too: Sumitomo Mitsui Banking in Jersey City (75, Oct. 1–13), Citibank in Hudson County (59, Oct. 31), JPMorgan Chase in Jersey City (63, in a window ending Nov. 15), and UBS in Weehawken (41, late November), 238 positions in all.

Adding the workforce figures for every notice in the state’s posted 2026 table that lists at least one effective date between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 produces a total just above 4,900: 4,916 positions across 38 notices. Some of those notices also list earlier or later dates, and the state table does not say how many workers go on each date. Independent layoff trackers that draw from the same state data show substantially higher year-to-date totals for all of 2026, on the order of 15,000 workers named across all notices (the state’s own 2026 table currently lists about 14,200 workers across 114 notices), so the holiday-season cluster is a subset, not the full picture.

A WARN notice is an advance warning, not a completed layoff. New Jersey’s law generally requires 90 days’ notice and severance for covered mass reductions. Companies sometimes withdraw or shrink notices, and some actions involve site consolidations or relocations in which employees may be offered transfers. Still, the filings create concrete planning problems for the households involved: resumes to update, benefits to sort out, and budgets to recalculate while stores are already stocking seasonal goods.

Company statements and prior reporting point to a mix of reasons. Several pharmaceutical employers have described portfolio shifts and restructuring. Mars has been consolidating U.S. corporate functions. Other notices reflect routine corporate reductions that happen in many states. New Jersey’s official archive simply records the local impact once the threshold for notice is met.

Governor Mikie Sherrill, who took office in January 2026, has faced criticism from opponents who tie the notices to the state’s tax and cost climate. The filings themselves do not assign political blame; they list employer, location, date, and headcount. Whether state policy is accelerating, slowing, or irrelevant to any given company’s decision is a separate argument that the raw notices do not settle.

What the numbers do settle is the scale of the near-term warning. More than 4,900 named positions, spread across dozens of employers and concentrated in the final quarter of the year, mean thousands of households are entering the holiday period with less certainty about paychecks than they had a few months earlier. That is the part that does not require a party label to understand.

Source: New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, 2026 WARN Notice Archive (accessed Oct. 6, 2026).

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Hudson TV asks: Are these layoffs mostly about New Jersey’s costs and taxes, or about companies restructuring no matter where they are? Share your take in the comments.