Laid off from Zurn Elkay.

What Zurn Elkay layoffs have meant for employees

Illinois and the company counted Savanna differently. The closing notice listed 135 workers for permanent layoffs, according to Illinois's April 2025 WARN report, while by October the company was telling KWQC that all 178 of the plant's workers had been offered transfers. The station, citing the state's database, said the moves had started in April, and it corrected an earlier version of its story that had called the transfers layoffs. The company also revised its count that month, KWQC reported, yet the state's later monthly reports added no workers to the April notice.

The notices gave very different amounts of time. Franklin Park's first layoffs were set 57 days after the state received its notice, according to Illinois's July 2023 report, and Bensenville's 63 days after, per its October 2024 report, while Savanna's schedule began three days after its notice, with the first moves, by KWQC's account, transfers. Lanark is about 18 miles from Savanna and Freeport about 40, the station said, so if you're offered a transfer, it's worth working out what a year of that drive would cost in gas and time. If a notice spreads its layoffs over several months, as Savanna's did, it can make sense to plan a job search or a move around the month your job is scheduled to end, though Savanna's schedule was revised more than once.

Zurn Elkay's list of principal plants and warehouses got shorter over the same years. The table in its 2025 10-K ran nearly half as long as the one in its 2022 10-K, with Illinois at three sites where it had been at six and Georgia at one where it had been at six. California, Texas and Pennsylvania each showed fewer, and Ohio, Mississippi, Utah and Virginia, all on the 2022 list, weren't on the 2025 one. Those tables are year-end snapshots of what the company counted as principal, so a site missing from the later one may have closed, been sold, been folded into another or simply fallen below that line. The 2022 restructuring note, for its part, described that year's actions as reflecting “the impact of acquisitions, including Elkay,” on manufacturing capacity. For anyone at a site outside Illinois, each year's table shows whether the company counted that location among its principal ones at year-end.

Elkay has moved work around its northern Illinois plants before. Savanna was where it said in 2008 it would send the commercial faucet work from St. Charles, Crain's reported, and in 2025 it was Savanna's jobs that were headed out, to Lanark and Freeport. Both times, the company named plants it was keeping as the work's next home.

Not everything that carried the Elkay name came with the deal. Elkay Interior Systems was spun off to Elkay's shareholders before Zurn's purchase closed, BizTimes reported, so its 2023 Fond du Lac and Spokane notices don't count as Zurn Elkay's. The same goes for a 2017 Elkay Wood Products row from Ringgold, Virginia, which our WARN tracker leaves out because Elkay agreed in 2018 to sell that cabinetry business to ACProducts. Elkay's own filings from before the deal do count, which is why the tracker goes back to Broadview in 2008.

In 2022, the year Elkay arrived, the company paid $12.9 million in cash against employee termination benefits, the 2022 10-K shows, and Elkay's own opening balance sheet carried $4.7 million in accrued termination benefits into the deal. Cash payments against those benefits ran to $1.7 million in 2024 and $2.7 million in 2025, the 2025 10-K's restructuring note shows. Union coverage was narrow by the company's own year-end 2025 count, about 160 of roughly 2,000 US employees, under four contracts, and of the three Illinois closing notices since the deal, only Franklin Park's listed a union. If your Zurn Elkay job ends at one of its Illinois plants, the benefits side of that starts with Illinois unemployment benefits.