Laid off from Owens & Minor.

What Owens & Minor layoffs have meant for employees

Which side of the 2025 sale a job sat on now decides which company's record it belongs to. The purchase agreement moved Owens & Minor Distribution, O&M Halyard and Medical Action Industries into the business Platinum Equity bought, and Virginia Business places Avid Medical there as well, so distribution, Halyard and kit-plant jobs sit with the privately held Owens & Minor. Apria and Byram stayed on the other side, with the company its closing release renamed Accendra Health. If you worked at Apria or Byram, Accendra is the parent company now, and Owens & Minor's count in our WARN tracker leaves out Apria's own 2009 and 2010 notices, filed before Owens & Minor bought it. The 2023 realignment, announced in the February 2023 release, covered the whole company while Apria and Byram were still part of it.

For anyone who moved with the business at the closing, the agreement also settled what came along. Transferred employees who were in the seller's 401(k) plan just before the closing were to be fully vested in it by the business day before, with those accounts, loan balances included, set to move to a new plan at the buyer, and unused vacation and paid time off rolled over, with no payout at the closing unless the law required one. Service before the sale counts toward eligibility and vesting in the buyer's plans to the extent the seller counted it, except for defined benefit pensions, nonqualified deferred compensation and retiree health or welfare benefits. If you came over in the sale, were in that 401(k) plan just before the closing and lose your job later, the employer money in your account at the closing was required to be fully vested by then.

The promise that runs through 2026 is narrower than it sounds. Under Section 7.4 the buyer agreed that, until December 31, 2026 or a worker's earlier exit, transferred employees would keep base pay and target incentives no lower than before the closing, and benefits, severance among them, no less favorable when taken as a whole, leaving out equity and long-term incentives, defined benefit pensions, retiree welfare benefits and deferred compensation. Section 7.11 then says the agreement grants employees no rights or remedies and doesn't stop the buyer from ending any transferred employee's job. If you moved with the business, had severance terms that covered you before the sale and are laid off with severance by December 31, 2026, comparing the two is one way to see what changed.

How a cut has reached people has depended on the kind of job. In 2016 the voluntary offer came ahead of the company-initiated separations, so U.S. salaried exempt staff who met its age and service criteria could choose to leave on enhanced terms while the choice was theirs. Announcing the 2023 program, chief executive Edward Pesicka said the company needed to move quickly to offset volume decline and cost and pricing headwinds, particularly in its global products division. Plant and warehouse cuts on record have come as site notices instead. The company called the Toano closing part of a broader long-term strategy for its surgical kitting network, James City County officials said they had known since January that consolidation or layoffs there were possible, and the letter left some separations for a later update to the state, so a notice's first date isn't every worker's date.

Toano's notice went to Virginia and the Mechanicsburg notice to Pennsylvania, and filing details for each state sit at Virginia unemployment benefits and unemployment in Pennsylvania. For people at Toano, James City County said in September that it had begun outreach to displaced workers and that several local employers had recently hired former Owens & Minor employees.

A sourced history of Owens & Minor layoffs

• September 2026, Avid Medical Toano kit plant closing

  Avid Medical told the state, Virginia Business reported, that it would close its Toano plant, cutting 419 jobs, about 380 from around November 25 and some 39 later. Jobs ran from 142 production coordinators and 71 assemblers to engineers and supervisors, and no union represented them.

• November 2025, Mechanicsburg Halyard warehouse layoffs

  Owens and Minor Halyard, Inc. scheduled 75 layoffs at its warehouse at 500 Independence Avenue in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, for November 28, 2025, under a WARN notice to the state that ABC27 covered.

• February 2023, company-wide Operating Model Realignment Program

  Owens & Minor's company-wide program to reduce costs, announced in its February 2023 release, included organizational structure redesign and network rationalization. Severance sat among the program's costs, beside professional fees, in its 2024 10-K.

• January 2016, voluntary separation program, then more separations

  Owens & Minor opened a voluntary separation program in January, and about 100 employees left under it. On February 29 it began separating about 90 more across the organization, and its March 2016 amended 8-K put the two groups at about 2% of its global workforce.

• 2010, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia contract layoffs

  Owens & Minor told Pennsylvania officials, Richmond BizSense reported, that it would immediately lay off the 73 employees it had working at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia after the hospital gave notice it would end their business relationship.

What to do if you're laid off from Owens & Minor

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Owens & Minor's biggest hubs: Virginia, Pennsylvania. 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 Owens & Minor's hub states run: Virginia, Pennsylvania, 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.