The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, known as WARN, requires an employer with 100 or more employees to give 60 days’ written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff. The rule that implements it defines a mass layoff as a job loss, at one site, for at least 50 employees within any 30-day period, and for at least a third of that site’s workforce, unless 500 or more employees are affected, in which case the one-third test drops out entirely. Notice goes to the workers or their union representative, to the state’s dislocated-worker unit, and to the chief elected official of the local government. Employers can shorten the 60 days only for a handful of named reasons: a faltering company that was actively seeking capital, a business circumstance that wasn’t reasonably foreseeable, or a natural disaster.
A separate section of the same regulation sets what the notice has to say, and it says less than most readers expect. It names the employment site and the employer’s contact, states whether the action is permanent or temporary, and gives the date separations are expected to begin. Full detail, including job titles, goes to the union or to state and local officials; a company can satisfy the state and local copy with just the site, the contact, a first separation date and a total headcount, keeping the rest on file for inspection rather than in the notice itself. Nothing in the form asks why the company is cutting staff, and nothing requires it to name a division, a studio or a product line. A filing tells you a legal employer, a place and a number. It does not tell you a reason, and often it does not tell you a team.
State law adds to the federal floor rather than replacing it, and the add-ons vary by state. California’s WARN Act applies to any employer with 75 or more full-time and part-time employees, well below the federal 100. It counts a mass layoff at 50 workers with no percentage test at all, so a large employer can trigger a California filing at a headcount that wouldn’t trigger a federal one. California also reaches plant relocations of 100 miles or more and out-of-country call-center moves, neither of which the federal statute covers, and it requires the notice to reach the state’s local workforce board along with information about CalFresh and unemployment benefits. Other states run their own versions with their own thresholds, which is why the same employer can owe a filing in one state on a headcount that would draw no filing at all in another.
None of this gets a reader to the name of a studio. A notice is filed by the entity that is legally the employer, which is very often a parent or holding company rather than the internal brand or team a player would recognize, and the WARN form has no field for “which internal division.” Here a filing is linked to a company by the employer’s name, and a name that lines up is nothing more than that, so a link can be wrong. It does not confirm that a filing at a company’s site is tied to its games business rather than another part of the same corporation under the same legal name, and it does not identify a studio within a multi-studio publisher. That’s why a notice’s label here names the legal filer, not a studio, and why a notice from a company with several studios shows its division as “Not named”: the filing doesn’t say which part of the company the cut touched, so neither do we.