Thousands Of Jobs Cut: NJ Companies With The Biggest Layoffs In 2022

NEW JERSEY — Even amid New Jersey's job growth and falling unemployment rate, some companies within the state made significant workforce cuts last year.

When a company enacts mass layoffs, federal law requires them to give advanced notice. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act applies to businesses with 100 or more full-time workers that lay off at least 50 people from a single worksite.

The New Jersey Department of Labor maintains a public list of WARN notices filed in the state, which include the number of layoffs from each company. The listings don't include the percentage of workers that each company cut, nor do they contain information on whether the businesses enacted smaller job cuts elsewhere in the state.

These companies were responsible for New Jersey's biggest layoffs of 2022, according to the state's WARN notices:

1. Bed Bath & Beyond (Port Reading): 328 workers affected; layoffs posted in July, effective Sept. 18.
2. Woodland Behavioral and Nursing Center (Andover): 250 workers affected; layoffs posted in June, effective Aug. 8.
3. Akorn Operating Company (Somerset): 240 workers affected; layoffs posted in May, effective July 31.
4. New York Daily News (Jersey City): 224 workers affected; layoffs posted in January 2022, effective March 8.
5. Novartis Pharmaceuticals (East Hanover): 225 workers affected; layoffs posted in November, effective Jan. 28. Novartis Serivces Inc. also cut
6. Daughters of Miriam (Clifton): 216 workers affected; layoffs posted in March, effective May 23.
7. Sivantos, Inc. (Piscataway): 189 workers affected; layoffs posted in August, effective Oct 31.
8. Lakeside Book Company (Cranbury): 164 workers affected; layoffs posted in January 2022, effective March 4.
9. Hapag-Lloyd America (Piscataway): 149 workers affected; layoffs posted in August, effective Sept. 30.
10. Adorama Shipping, Inc. (Elizabeth): 146 workers affected; layoffs posted in October, effective Nov. 28.

Bed Bath & Beyond warned last week that it may file for bankruptcy in the immediate future, with the New Jersey-based retailer's future in peril. The company made massive job cuts in recent years, reducing the workforce from 65,000 in 2018 to 32,000 as of March, according to Macrotrends data.

• Related article: More Closures For Bed Bath & Beyond, Buy Buy Baby In NJ

The retailer announced plans last August to close 150 of its roughly 900 stores and cut 20 percent of its workforce, but the business didn't say which locations may close. Bed Bath & Beyond, which also owns Buy Buy Baby and Harmon Face Values, has since released a list of 120-plus stores set to close, including seven in New Jersey that have already shuttered:

• Bed Bath & Beyond: 34 E Ridgewood Ave., Paramus
• Bed Bath & Beyond: 30 International Drive, Suite 1, Flanders
• Bed Bath & Beyond: 13 Route 9 S, Manalapan
• Buy Buy Baby: 601 Nassau Park Blvd., Princeton
• Buy Buy Baby: 327 Mount Hope Ave., Suite 1003, Rockaway
• Harmon: 399 Route 46 W, Rockaway
• Harmon: 3189 Route 46, Parsippany

One of New Jersey's biggest layoffs came from the closure of Woodland Behavioral and Nursing Center. The troubled nursing home gained notoriety after 17 bodies were discovered crammed into a makeshift morgue during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state took over the nursing home last May, transferring its residents to other homes and preparing for the facility's August shutdown.

The list also includes two pharmaceutical giants: Novartis Pharmaceuticals and Akorn Operating Company. Novartis, a Swiss corporation, laid off about 8,000 of its 108,000 worldwide staff last year, citing needs to streamline operations.

Both companies faced expensive legal trouble in recent years — although it's unclear how much those settlements played into job cuts within Novartis and Akorn.

In 2018, U.S. and Greek authorities began investigating Novartis for allegations that the company bribed Greek public officials, including prime ministers and health ministers, from 2006-15. Novartis reached combined settlements of more than $346 million in June 2020, with the company and some of its subsidiaries paying $223 million to the U.S. Department of Justice and $112.8 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last September, Akorn settled for $7.9 million to resolve allegations that the company caused Medicare to pay false claims. As part of the settlement, Akorn admitted that it continued to sell generic drugs under obsolete, prescription-only labeling after the drugs were no longer eligible for Medicare coverage.

New York Daily News rounds out the top five, with the media outlet cutting 224 jobs at its Jersey City facility, where its printing operations took place. The Daily News planned to outsource its printing to North Jersey Media Group, which publishes the Bergen Record, the Herald News and the Daily Record, the New York Post reported.

Alden Global Capital — a New York-based hedge fund — bought the newspaper from Tribune Publishing in 2021. Vanity Fair dubbed Alden "the grim reaper of newspapers," as the hedge fund is known for sharply cutting costs and reducing the number of journalists at its publications. Alden owned about 350 publications as of May 2021, when it fully purchased Tribune Publishing.