Laid off from Advanced Drainage Systems.

What Advanced Drainage Systems layoffs have meant for employees

ADS's Olympia WARN letter shows how one of its closings was laid out for the people inside the plant. Washington's Employment Security Department stamped it received the day it was dated. It listed the jobs by title, among them 11 downstream technicians, 9 line operators, 6 yard loaders and 2 drivers. Its pay pledge covered everyone let go, whichever date applied to them. The letter also said bumping rights didn't apply, and it named Teamsters Local 252 as the union representing the drivers. In both 2025 notices the first layoff date fell 60 days after the filing, by our count of the dates in that letter and Iowa’s WARN log. If a closing notice gives a date for your job group, it's worth planning around that date, since it can come months before the site closes, as it did for most of the Olympia plant's staff.

The reduction ADS announced in February 2023 went beyond the three facility closures disclosed on the same call, to its manufacturing and transportation headcount as a whole. On the February 2, 2023 call, Barbour tied headcount reductions and plant closures to higher absorption costs as domestic construction demand slowed, measured the reduction, about 15%, from that workforce's peak and said temporary labor had been eliminated and overtime minimized. He described it in the present tense, as work under way that February. The fiscal 2023 annual report booked $4.1 million in severance and accelerated depreciation for that year's restructuring.

Severance shows up in ADS's filings as company totals, and the 2018 numbers show who a plan covered. The 2018 Restructuring Plan note booked more corporate severance than plant severance, so that plan's cuts took in corporate staff as well as plant workers, and its costs that year came to $11.4 million. ADS still reported severance liabilities from both earlier programs at their fiscal year-ends, $0.5 million long-term at March 31, 2018 and $1.3 million short-term at March 31, 2023. Under the 2026 plan, severance came to about $5.3 million from April 2025 through September 2026, by our sum of figures in ADS's fiscal 2026 10-K and September 2026 10-Q. If ADS has offered you severance, negotiating severance covers that conversation.

Several of these changes reconfigured ADS's network. In Waterloo's case a spokesperson pointed to other ADS plants for the capacity, in fiscal 2023 two production sites were converted into distribution yards, and the fiscal 2026 note counts the cost of transferring inventory and equipment among the 2026 plan's exit costs. The annual report describes the 2026 plan in those terms too, as optimizing ADS's production, recycling and distribution network.

If you came to ADS with NDS, the annual report lists integrating NDS among the 2026 plan's purposes, and the 10-Q shows ADS sold two NDS units, Teco S.r.l. and Teco Irrigation USA, in July 2026 and expected to sell the rest of NDS's international businesses, the Kimplas units and Fish Water Products, in fiscal 2027's third quarter. In that filing, which covers the quarter through September 30, 2026, ADS said it didn't have an estimate of additional costs or an expected end date for the restructuring. Our WARN tracker counts NDS's 2021 California closing notice with ADS's own because ADS has owned NDS since February 2026.

If an ADS notice listed your job, the unemployment pages for Washington, Iowa, Alabama and New Jersey, the states behind its notices since 2023, are a reasonable first stop. Our article on how COBRA works covers keeping health coverage after a job ends.