WARNing for employers: Changes coming to New Jersey's WARN Act

Effective July 19, 2020 (under new legislation signed by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy on January 21), employers in the state with at least 100 employees over a three-year period will have new and expanded obligations to provide their employees with advance notice and severance pay under revisions to the state's Millville Dallas Airmotive Plant Job Loss Notification Act (NJ WARN). As a result of the revisions, New Jersey will have the most burdensome and expensive reduction-in-force (RIF) legislation in the country.

What the changes mean

According to the new law, NJ WARN may be triggered by any termination of 50 or more employees, aggregating terminations across multiple locations that report to the same jobsite, regardless of where in the state they occur. The change eliminates the previous focus on the number of employees affected by a layoff at a single location, like most federal and state WARN legislation. An employee transferred out of state or to a location more than 50 miles from her original employment site also will be deemed a "termination of employment" under the new law.