Layoffs in District of Columbia.

Where District of Columbia layoffs have been concentrated

The District's record is dominated by the two things that fill its buildings, hospitality and institutional services. The transit authority filed for 1,604 jobs during the pandemic. The Wardman Park and Omni Shoreham hotels in Woodley Park filed for 731 and 599, the Washington Hilton for 533, and a food service contractor at the downtown arena for 738. A hospital closure took 898.

The current year continues the pattern in a different register. A medical facility operator filed for more than twelve hundred jobs, the largest recent filing in our record for the city.

What links almost all of these is that the employer on the notice is frequently not the institution where the work happened. A caterer, a facilities company, a staffing operation. That distinction runs through everything below, because in the District it does not only determine who owed you notice. It can also determine whether you have a right to keep the job when the contract moves.

Our record for the District begins in 2017 and shows the expected pandemic concentration, 53 rows in 2020 in a city whose hotel and restaurant economy stopped entirely. The recent years are heavier than the pre-pandemic ones.

The companies that keep filing in District of Columbia

In a contract economy, a repeat filer is usually a services company cycling through accounts rather than a business in trouble. District employers with three or more notices in the window.

• Institue of International Education · 7 notices since 2023
• ACDI VOCA · 3 notices since 2023
• United Medical Center · 3 notices since 2023

Where a facilities or food service company appears more than once, check whether the underlying contract moved to a competitor rather than ending. If it did, the retention right below may apply to you even though your employer's name on the notice is the one going away.

DC has no notice law, but contract workers have a retention right

The District has no mini-WARN act. The federal WARN act supplies the notice rule and nothing local adds to it, so sixty days from employers of a hundred or more is the whole of what you are owed in advance. Notices go to the Department of Employment Services, which publishes them and runs rapid response.

The District's own contribution is a different kind of protection, and for a large share of the workers behind the filings above it is worth more than notice would be. Under the Displaced Workers Protection Act, certain contracted workers keep their jobs when the contract changes hands.

Coverage is specific. The act reaches employees hired by a contractor as food service workers in a hotel, restaurant, cafeteria, apartment building, hospital or nursing facility; janitorial or building maintenance workers in an office building or institution; nonprofessional health care and related support workers in a hospital or nursing facility; and security workers in an office building or institution, though armed special police officers and school security are excluded. Three groups are excluded outright. Anyone working under fifteen hours a week, anyone employed in an executive, administrative or professional capacity, and anyone required by District law as it stood on April 26, 1994 to hold an occupational license. That third exclusion is easy to miss and it removes a good many licensed trades from the act. A contractor here means a company employing twenty-five or more people, and includes subcontractors.

The mechanics are unusually concrete. Within ten days of a contract being awarded, the outgoing contractor must give prospective contractors the names of everyone employed at the site, their hire dates and their occupation classifications. The incoming contractor must then retain, for a ninety-day transition period, covered employees who worked for the previous contractor at that site for the preceding eight months or longer. If it needs fewer people, it retains by seniority within job classification and keeps a preferential hiring list of those it did not take. During those ninety days it cannot discharge a retained employee without cause, and at the end it must carry out a written performance evaluation and offer continued employment where performance was satisfactory.

Enforcement belongs to the worker and it carries fee-shifting. An employee wrongfully discharged by the new contractor may bring an action in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for back pay covering each day the violation continues, calculated at the higher of the average regular rate over the last three years in the same classification or the final regular rate, plus the cost of benefits the new contractor would have provided. The court is directed to allow the prevailing party reasonable attorney's fees, and the statute expressly preserves any common law wrongful termination claim.

What happens after a WARN notice is filed in District of Columbia

Notices are published by the Department of Employment Services, which is the record this page mirrors, and the department runs the rapid response sessions that follow.

If you worked under a services contract, establish immediately whether the contract ended or moved. A contract that moved to a new company is the situation the retention act was written for, and the eight-month service condition is the first thing to check against your own hire date.

Keep your own proof of when you started and what your classification was. The outgoing contractor is supposed to hand that list over within ten days of the award, but a worker with their own records is in a far better position than one relying on an employer that is leaving.

Open the District claim as work ends through our DC benefits page, which carries the weekly figures and the filing link, and remember that pursuing a retention claim does not require you to sit out of the benefit system while you do it.

Use what District of Columbia owes you

• If your job was on a services contract, find out whether the contract moved to another company or ended outright. Only the first triggers the retention right, and it is the difference between a job and a job search.
• Check whether you had eight months or more at that site with the outgoing contractor. That is the service condition for retention, and it runs to the site rather than to the company.
• Write down your hire date, job classification and rate before your last day. The outgoing contractor is required to pass that list to bidders within ten days of an award, and your own copy is the backup.
• If a new contractor let you go inside the ninety-day transition period without cause, that is the specific violation the statute addresses, and the Superior Court claim carries attorney fees for a prevailing worker.
• Commuters, file where the wages were earned rather than where you live. A District job worked from Maryland or Virginia generally belongs to the District's system, and filing in the wrong one costs weeks.

The biggest layoffs in District of Columbia's record

Our District record opens in 2017 and its defining year is 2020, when 53 filings arrived from hotels, restaurants, caterers and the transit authority within months of each other.

The city's exposure in that period was unusually concentrated because two of its largest private employment categories, hospitality and institutional food service, depend on a working population that stopped commuting in.

Recent volume sits above the pre-pandemic level, and the composition has shifted toward healthcare and facilities operators rather than hotels, which is a different mix of employers filing for a similar mix of workers.

Common questions