Business Data

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) program produces data on job openings, hires, and separations.

Collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days. The program was eliminated on September 30, 2013 because of budget cuts.

Included in Bloomberg Law/BNA Labor Plus. This is only available in the FSU Law Library. Please speak with the law librarians.

The federal WARN Act requires large employers to give advance notice of layoffs to state governments and workers. Though states publish this information, no entity collects these layoff notices across the many states.All state data in the WARN Publicly available database includes info on the Company, Number of Workers, and Date of Notice. Some states include additional information including City of Operation, Layoff Date, Type of Layoff, Union, and Industry.

The layoff data in this data set is much smaller (we estimate it's a 10% sample of actual unemployment), but it comes from public notices filed by employers. It's currently not possible (as far as we know) to get this data in one place at a company and regional level for large companies. Unemployment data is only published once a month in aggregate, making it harder to understand what's happening locally or which employers are the largest contributors (even though you can get breakdowns by industry / sector). The company notices are filed before or immediately when layoffs occur, whereas unemployment data may not be available for up to 8 weeks after the actual unemployment takes place. Some states update their websites every week or even every day with the most recent data, which is a leading indicator of what's going to happen. There is free data until April 30, 2020, and premium data feed.