Laid off from Shell.

What Shell layoffs have meant for employees

For people in Houston and Shell's other large offices, the two broadest cuts came as worldwide plans. Shell set out to shed thousands of jobs around the world in 2020 as the pandemic crushed demand, the Associated Press wrote at the time, and in 2024 to shrink its exploration and development workforce by a fifth, felt in particular in Houston and The Hague, company sources told Reuters. Neither report gave a number for the United States. The company has shrunk each year since 2023, with North America down from 24,000 employees to 21,000, according to Shell's Form 20-F for 2025. Shell credits the 2025 drop to efficiencies, businesses it sold and activities it ended, so the falling headcount isn't a count of layoffs. Of the three years the filing reports, 2024 carried the most redundancy and restructuring charges, more than 2023 and 2025 combined.

Most of Volta's staff already held offers to start with Shell or its affiliates when every Volta job was terminated effective May 31, 2024, as Volta's letter to Oregon set out, and Volta called that notice a precaution. A count of those 2024 notices doesn't show how many people were left without work. The 2025 shutdown was a later layoff for the division, when Shell moved to close Volta and, by AdExchanger's account in CSP Daily News, let its staff go while leaving them free to apply for similar Shell roles. If you went from Volta to Shell in 2024 and lost the Shell job in 2025, it's useful to keep the 2024 offer letter with any paperwork from the 2025 cut, since one records when your Shell job began and the other when it ended.

Shell Recharge, which Electrek traces to Greenlots, a company Shell bought in 2019, had already announced it would switch off its charging software on other companies' commercial chargers after April 2025, saying it was focusing its investments where it had a competitive advantage, months before its layoff notices. Its letters describe a primarily remote workforce, and they went to California because the company used its Los Angeles headquarters to decide which places to notify. The August 2025 letter Washington posted spreads its cut across 24 states, with 53 people in California and as few as one in others, and names field service technicians, software engineers and contract and procurement staff, while the January 2026 letter reaches into product and engineering leadership. Its August letter counted people supporting the media network business among those cut, the same month AdExchanger reported that Volta Media would shut by November. If you worked remotely for Shell Recharge, your state's WARN list may show only a person or two, even though the company told California its August 2025 cut covered about 114 people.

At Shell's Convent refinery in Louisiana, severance came out of a union negotiation. The Steelworkers and Shell scaled pay to years of service between a set minimum and maximum, and Shell offered its salaried staff a similar package, Reuters reported in November 2020, while hourly workers could apply at two other Louisiana plants and some could stay on to clean up the site into 2021. That was one refinery's deal at a closing, negotiated by Shell and the bargaining unit. If you belong to a union at a Shell site facing a closure, the Convent terms give your local a concrete example to cite.

Several of these notices carry a unit's legal name, among them Zeco Systems and MP2 Energy, so those names and Volta's belong in any search of our WARN tracker alongside Shell's.