Laid off from IDEX.

What IDEX layoffs have meant for employees

Each IDEX plant closing in state WARN records is filed under the name of one of the businesses IDEX owns. Connecticut's letters about Bristol come from IDEX Health & Science LLC, which also filed the 2018 Carlsbad notice in California, while Illinois's notices name Liquid Controls LLC and The Fitzpatrick Company. Fitzpatrick sits inside IDEX MPT, and Liquid Controls is grouped with Corken and SAMPI as Advanced Flow Solutions, which has operations in Oklahoma City and Altopascio, Italy, IDEX's 2025 10-K shows. In our WARN tracker, you can look each filing up under those business names.

The Bristol positions ranged from 25 machinists and 13 assemblers to engineers, technicians, planners and supervisors, and the director of engineering was listed for separation in July, according to the job list attached to the May notice. The notice adds that the Bristol employees lacked bumping rights and union representation. Mark Spencer, an IDEX Health & Science vice president, told Patch that month that Bristol production would wind down over six months, and part of the shutdown has since been pushed back to December 31. If you worked at the Bristol plant, the date in the May notice may not be the day your job ends, and the October 1 letter says each employee whose date changed was told the new one and that the separation is still permanent.

In three of the four closings, the business said the work would keep going at another IDEX site, and at Lake Bluff the relocation it described was much smaller than the operation it was moving. When Liquid Controls sought Oklahoma City incentives in February 2021, its president said the company would relocate five or six jobs from the Chicago area and hire for the rest of 120 new positions there, Lake Forest Patch reported, while 87 Lake Bluff workers faced layoffs. City officials expected the new jobs over five years at an average base pay of about $50,000 plus benefits. Liquid Controls' president tied the move to long-term changes in the energy and transportation sectors. One worker, who wasn't named, told the outlet that officials had first blamed the pandemic and that people from Oklahoma were brought in for the Lake Bluff staff to train on their own jobs, an unverified account. At least one consolidation came out of growth. Gus Salem, a group president, told Rochester Business Journal that growth in life science markets drove IDEX's 2018 optics consolidation and that a large base of employees already in the Rochester area was part of the choice, while another executive, Michael Ransford, recalled weighing whether to do it all in California or all in New York.

Payroll continuation, COBRA subsidies, outplacement services and conditional separation costs appear among the severance costs IDEX listed in its 2017 restructuring note and again in its 2025 restructuring note, so that's what the company has counted as severance in its own books. Neither the Bristol nor the Lake Bluff statement put a figure on the packages or said how they were calculated. At Lake Bluff, where the plant had a union, Liquid Controls said it worked with the union on benefits to help people move to new jobs. If your package includes a COBRA subsidy, there's background on that coverage in how COBRA works.

IDEX's filings also describe broader restructuring and headcount reductions. The January 2025 restructuring reduced headcount and removed some management layers, changes IDEX said would help it self-fund more growth and speed up decisions, so its cuts haven't been limited to the factory floor. If your IDEX job ended in Connecticut, Illinois or California, that state's own claim rules can be checked on the Connecticut, Illinois or California unemployment pages.