Laid off from Ashley Furniture.

What Ashley Furniture layoffs have meant for employees

With Ashley saying the work from its Colton and Mesquite plants would stay inside the company, the question for the people losing jobs there was whether they could go with it. Its reasons for moving Colton's production in 2016, as Surface & Panel reported them, were efficiency and staying competitive. In 2022 and 2026 it gave affected workers a chance to go with the work. At Statesville, Ashley tied its offer to the consolidation, saying in a statement released to WFDD that it would offer employees "opportunities to continue working at Ashley in the Advance facility."

At Mesquite, Chron reported, affected workers might apply for jobs at other Ashley facilities or at the company's distribution center in the city, the one site the offers named. Those were available positions, offered to some workers according to TheStreet, and under the filing it quoted no one had bumping rights, so what was on offer depended on which jobs Ashley had open, with positions and start dates to be explained in meetings with employees. Under the filing's wording, taking another Ashley role and getting the severance were alternatives, so for anyone at Mesquite the offer and the payout were a single decision, made with whatever details those meetings would give.

Ground was broken for the Mesquite plant in October 2017, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, as Chron reported, that "the hundreds of jobs Ashley Furniture is bringing to the Lone Star State is the latest example of the economic diversification Texas enjoys." By 2026 the filing's list of positions ran from upholstery training workers, machine operators and packers through kit receiving and material handling to inspectors and operations and quality supervisors, and it said no employee there was represented by a union.

Ashley's retail side has been cut too. Stoneledge Furniture, the subsidiary behind the 2020 notices for the Colton HomeStore and the Lathrop warehouse, ran 14 retail furniture stores in California with about 600 sales associates when a wage case's class was certified, according to the Ninth Circuit opinion of 2016. If you're employed at a company-run Ashley store in California, Stoneledge may be the employer on your paperwork.

At Colton, extra help after the closing depended on a federal finding about where the jobs went. After the state petitioned on September 8, 2016, pointing to work shipped overseas, the Trade Adjustment Assistance certification Rep. Pete Aguilar announced that month covered workers laid off on or after September 7, 2015, so people let go at Colton before the closing was announced could apply as well. It made them eligible for training such as apprenticeships, on-the-job training, GED preparation, post-secondary education and English as a Second Language, plus unemployment benefits and Trade Readjustment Allowances while they trained.

At Colton, Statesville and Mesquite alike, roughly two months passed between the notice and the planned last day, and that stretch is when each closing's terms played out. Ashley's Colton statement had pay and benefits continuing through it. The March 2020 California notices ran the other way, dated March 26 and 27, after the March 20 effective date each one lists. If you turn down another Ashley job, you can read about unemployment claims in Texas, California, North Carolina and Wisconsin, the four states where Ashley has filed notices. If Ashley has offered you another role with a start date, you may go without an Ashley paycheck between your last shift at the old site and that date.