Laid off from Daifuku Services America.

What Daifuku Services America layoffs have meant for employees

If your pay stubs, badge or offer letter say Elite Line Services, you worked for the company now called Daifuku Services America, and Colorado's WARN entry for the Thornton site spells out the link with "formerly Elite Line Services." Paperwork from after the change may use DSUS, the new abbreviation the company's December 2023 letter gave in place of ELS. A Daifuku holding company bought Elite Line Services in 2012, when Modern Materials Handling described its work as operations and maintenance for baggage handling systems, passenger boarding bridges and ground support equipment at airports. State WARN records carry both names, and the oldest entry under either in our WARN tracker is a 2017 Los Angeles closure filed as Elite Line Services, Inc., so it's worth searching the tracker for both.

At the Amazon sites, the 2024 layoffs were a lost contract. In Charlotte, where the company's notice to the state covered closing its Old Dowd Road facility, the company said Amazon had canceled its contract, WSOC-TV reported, and the 2024 layoffs in Texas, North Carolina, California, Maryland, Illinois and Colorado were due to Amazon changing maintenance vendors, the Upjohn Institute, which tracks Michigan's layoffs, later wrote. One customer's choice of vendor put crews on notice within a week at sites from the Kern County addresses in California's WARN report to Baltimore. For the crews inside Amazon's buildings, the job was tied to Amazon's contract, and when that contract went, the Daifuku jobs at the sites it covered were set to end with it.

If you're holding both a Daifuku layoff notice and an offer from a vendor taking over your site's work, the dates are worth setting side by side. The 2024 Colorado Springs letter gave April 22, 2024 as its separation date, and if an incoming offer states a start date, pay or benefits, those details can be checked against that date and against what you had. That letter expected the cut to be permanent, so an offer from the incoming vendor would be for a job with a different employer.

Daifuku's Colorado Springs letter shows who that site's cut covered, and The Gazette found the same kinds of jobs, maintenance managers and technicians, engineers and planners, across all three Colorado letters. The Colorado Springs job list describes a maintenance operation that mixed technicians and apprentices with planners, an engineer and managers, including 26 Maintenance Tech II and 23 Maintenance Tech III positions and 11 mechatronic apprentices among the 89. The letter also says the company was giving notice "for transparency even though the number of separations at the site may not implicate federal or state notice obligations."

Nevada's four entries, received February 22 under the Elite Line Services name, appear on Nevada's 2024 WARN list with the same April 22 effective date as the other states' notices. They're the ones no source we read ties to a customer, the Upjohn Institute's list of Amazon-tied states included. If you worked at one of those Henderson, Las Vegas or North Las Vegas sites, your entry on the state's list is under Elite Line Services rather than Daifuku, and Nevada's benefit rules are on our Nevada unemployment page.

For the Detroit layoff, the date Michigan records is the day the jobs were set to end, not the day the notice was filed. If you were on that notice, our Michigan unemployment page lays out what the state pays and how to apply. The pages for Colorado and California do the same for the other states with the most 2024 entries in the tracker.