Layoffs in Hawaii.

Where Hawaii layoffs have been concentrated

The current record is the visible face of an island economy. Hotels and their service contractors, hospitals and clinics, retail in the malls, and agricultural research on the outer islands. A coffee producer, a jewelry counter at Pearlridge, a Waikiki hotel, a health center, a food service contractor. Individually modest, collectively the whole picture.

Volume tells the rest. Our Hawaii record holds 453 rows since 2019, and 260 of them fall in 2020 alone. That is 57 percent of everything we hold for the state in one year. Across the thirty-six state archives we hold covering eight years or more, the next heaviest single year is Missouri's 2020 at 47 percent. When visitor arrivals stop, this economy stops in a way a diversified one does not, and the notice log recorded it in real time.

That dependence is the argument for reading the law section below carefully rather than skimming it. In a state where a single sector can take the whole labor market down at once, a statute that tops your income back up for a month is not a technicality.

One limit you will notice immediately. Hawaii publishes its notices without job counts and without a location, so the rail below shows employers and dates and nothing else. We are not withholding those numbers. The state's real-time listing does not carry them, which is why the summary above omits a job total rather than printing a zero.

The companies that keep filing in Hawaii

Repeat filing in a small labor market usually means a chain or a contractor working through several sites. Hawaii employers reaching three or more notices in the window.

• Watabe Wedding Corp · 3 notices since 2023

Without job counts there is no way to weight these entries, so a filer that closed one small outlet ranks the same as one that closed a division. Treat the list as a prompt to open the individual notices rather than as a ranking.

Hawaii tops up your unemployment check for four weeks

Hawaii's Dislocated Workers Act is one of the most worker-protective layoff statutes in the country, and almost nobody outside the state knows it exists. A covered establishment is any business entity employing fifty or more people at any time in the preceding twelve months, which reaches far below the federal act's hundred.

The notice duty is sixty days. An employer must give each employee and the director written notification of a closing, divestiture, partial closing or relocation at least sixty days before it happens. Miss it and the employer is liable to each affected employee for back pay and benefits across the period of violation up to sixty days, reduced by wages actually paid in that window. There is a separate civil penalty of up to five hundred dollars a day, which the employer can avoid by satisfying what it owes the employees within three weeks of the closing.

Then the provision that makes this state different. Under section 394B-10, when a closing, partial closing or relocation happens, the employer must pay each affected employee who qualifies for unemployment a dislocated worker allowance on top of the benefit. The amount is the difference between the employee's average weekly wages before the closing and the weekly unemployment benefit received, which means the two together restore your former pay. It runs for a maximum of four weeks per closing, and receiving it does not reduce your unemployment benefit or affect eligibility for it.

Now the limit that secondary summaries routinely miss, and it decides whether any of this applies to you. Hawaii defines a closing as a permanent shutdown tied to a sale, transfer, merger, other business takeover or transaction of business interests, bankruptcy, or other close of business transaction. A partial closing carries the same transactional requirement. A straightforward economic layoff that is not attached to a transaction of that kind may sit outside the chapter entirely, so the first question to answer is what business event your closure was part of.

Enforcement here is unusually strong and it belongs to you rather than to an agency. Section 394B-13 lets one or more employees bring an action in any court of competent jurisdiction, on their own behalf or through a designated representative, and provides that the court shall allow costs of action, fees of any nature and reasonable attorney's fees to be paid by the defendant, in addition to any judgment. The court may also grant injunctive relief. Separately, section 394B-12 makes an employer who fails to conform to the chapter liable to each affected employee for the value of all wages, benefits and other compensation for the three months preceding the closure.

A collective bargaining agreement that already provides supplemental unemployment benefits supersedes the allowance for the workers it covers, so union members should read the contract before assuming the statute governs.

What happens after a WARN notice is filed in Hawaii

Notices go to the director of labor and industrial relations and appear on the department's real-time WARN listing, which is the record behind this page.

Apply for unemployment first, because the allowance is built on top of it. The statute conditions the payment on being found eligible for unemployment compensation for the week in question, so a claim that is not open is a claim that cannot be supplemented. Get it filed through our Hawaii benefits page before you chase anything else.

Then ask your employer in writing whether it is treating the event as a closing, partial closing or relocation under chapter 394B, and if so, when the dislocated worker allowance will be paid. Employers do not volunteer this. Four weeks at your old wage rather than your benefit rate is a large sum in a state with this cost of living, and the fee-shifting provision means a lawyer can look at a refusal without money up front.

Take the rapid response session for the retraining funding as well, since what dislocated worker money covers is wider than the name suggests, and inter-island relocation is a real cost the program can sometimes address.

Use what Hawaii owes you

• Work out whether your closing was tied to a sale, merger, bankruptcy or similar transaction. That link is what brings chapter 394B into play, and a purely economic shutdown may fall outside it.
• Open the unemployment claim before anything else. The dislocated worker allowance is a supplement to a benefit you have been found eligible for, so no claim means no allowance.
• Ask your employer in writing when the allowance will be paid and for how many weeks. Four weeks is the statutory maximum per closing, and the amount is your old average weekly wage minus the benefit.
• If you are in a union, check whether your contract already provides supplemental unemployment benefits. Where it does, the contract supersedes the statutory allowance for you.
• If the employer refuses, remember that the statute requires the court to award your costs and attorney's fees against them if you prevail. That changes what a lawyer will take on.

The biggest layoffs in Hawaii's record

The archive we hold begins in 2019, which means it opens directly onto the worst year in modern Hawaii employment. Two states in our data show a higher single-year share than Hawaii's 57 percent, Michigan at 63 percent and North Carolina at 100, but we hold three years for one and a single year for the other, so the comparison carries no weight. Among archives deep enough to compare, Hawaii's 2020 sits at the top of the range.

The years since have settled into the twenties and thirties annually, which is the ordinary background rate for an economy of this size. What changed is not the volume but the composition, with healthcare and professional services appearing more often against a hospitality sector that had previously supplied nearly everything.

Because the record starts in 2019, nothing here can speak to how Hawaii behaved in earlier downturns, and this page does not try.

Common questions