Laid off from First Brands Group.

What First Brands Group layoffs have meant for employees

First Brands Group grew by buying parts makers with borrowed money, from FRAM filters to Anco wiper blades, and its bankruptcy filings counted 26,000 people on its payroll in 2024, The Dallas Morning News reported. Federal prosecutors later charged founder Patrick James and his brother Edward, a senior vice president, with defrauding the company's lenders in an indictment made public in January 2026, and both pleaded not guilty, the Akron Beacon Journal reported. For the people in the plants, what came next mattered more. Faced with the fraud allegations, lenders refused to put in more money, according to a Bloomberg report carried by Transport Topics.

How the end arrived depended on the site. The letters on record give two reasons, financing the company believed it could find and couldn't, as a Texas notice put it, and bidders who had "suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn or narrowed their bids," in the words of an Ohio notice. Dates moved, too, as the company kept people on while it tried to sell their plants. If you have a notice or final pay stubs from First Brands, it may be worth keeping them with your own records.

The counts in the record don't always line up, so if you're checking the numbers for your own site, it helps to know where each one comes from. Our tracker uses the 642 jobs in Illinois's records of the Champion Laboratories notices for Albion, while WFIW reported a broader figure, as many as 1,000 people left out of work by the closing.

A buyer could turn a layoff into a change of employer. Factories making parts that automakers couldn't do without were kept running with their customers' help while the company sold what it could, and in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois some plants that had been slated to close, or had already closed, ended up with new owners who kept people on or set out to hire them back. If your plant was among them, the hiring decisions belong to the buyer, and it's worth asking the new owner's human resources office about getting back on rather than waiting to hear.

Pay questions now sit with the bankruptcy court. By late January the company was living week to week on payments its automaker customers made in advance, and when the U.S. Trustee asked in May 2026 to turn the case over to a trustee, its only major assets left were lawsuits against former insiders and others, and the U.S. Trustee expected a trustee to use those suits to raise money for creditors, the same Bloomberg report said. The case docket on Kroll's case page also lists a case the United Auto Workers brought against First Brands, and if you belong to the union, the UAW is a place to ask what that case seeks.

Our WARN tracker has the notices on file if you want the dates and counts for your own site. You can search it under First Brands Group, and under Cardone Industries and Dalton Corporation, units that filed under their own names, and then match the city and the date. All time, it holds 62 filings by First Brands and the units it owns, earlier notices from businesses it bought among them. Ohio, Illinois, Texas and Indiana hold the most First Brands jobs in the tracker since 2025, and our unemployment pages for Ohio, Illinois, Texas and Indiana lay out how each state handles a new claim.

A sourced history of First Brands Group layoffs

• July 2026, Jasper Rubber sold to Press-Seal's owners

  First Brands stopped work at the Jasper, Indiana plant in March, after a February notice for 345 jobs. The buyer's July 2026 release planned a summer restart, and Press-Seal's president said Jasper's former workforce would be the first place it looked.

• May 2026, Tiffin and Bowling Green plants sold to JVIS

  After the February closing notices, new letters kept 669 Ohio workers on the payroll through May while First Brands hunted for a buyer, Newsweek reported. A JVIS affiliate then bought both Toledo Molding & Die plants, per BG Independent News.

• March 2026, Brownsville and Fayetteville closing notices

  Notices set April 30 closings for 571 jobs at three Brownsville, Texas sites and 333 at Toledo Molding & Die's plant in Fayetteville, Tennessee, TheStreet reported.

• February 2026, Champion Labs closes in Albion, Illinois

  Champion Laboratories stopped work in Albion on February 23 when First Brands couldn't find a buyer, leaving up to 1,000 jobless. By May, Premium Guard had bought the main plant and hired about three dozen, WFIW reported.

• February 2026, Hopkins, FRAM and AVM sites in other states

  February rows in our tracker cover Hopkins sites in Kansas and Oklahoma, FRAM in Kentucky, AVM in Marion, South Carolina and a California site; rows for Michigan and for Eagle Castings in York, Pennsylvania carry February effective dates.

• February 2026, Cleveland office and Ohio plants set to close

  First Brands cut 146 at its Cleveland office on February 23, the date its WARN notice was sent, and set April 30 closings for the rest of that office and plants in Greenville, Tiffin and Bowling Green, per the Akron Beacon Journal.

• January 2026, Cardone closes Texas sites in a wind-down

  A January 26 letter closed Cardone's distribution center in Arlington, Texas for good, affecting 88 employees, and a Harlingen closing took Cardone's Texas layoffs to 129. The segments being shut, those two sites and 15 more nationwide, employed about 4,000 people, The Dallas Morning News reported.

• December 2025, Dalton facility in Warsaw, Indiana to close

  First Brands told Indiana in its notice to the state that it would close the Dalton Corporation facility for good, affecting 262 workers, with 257 set to go on February 27, 2026. Union members there belonged to United Steelworkers Local 6805.

What to do if you're laid off from First Brands Group

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. First Brands Group's biggest hubs: Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Indiana. Somewhere else? Every state is here.
• Apply for financial and hardship assistance. Unemployment supplements income, but food benefits, health coverage and utility help are often available as well. Here's some of what First Brands Group's hub states run: Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Indiana, and every other state is here.
• Mind the health insurance window. Losing coverage opens a 60-day special enrollment period, and an ACA plan usually beats unsubsidized COBRA. Compare your options before the employer coverage lapses, and read how the COBRA clocks run if you are weighing it seriously.
• Get your real runway number. Severance plus savings divided by reality. The calculator takes five minutes.
• Know which clocks are already running. Severance review windows, COBRA election, visa grace periods, and 401(k) rollovers all run on federal deadlines that started at termination. All five deadlines are here.