We have talked, in the recent past about the not so sweet behavior that the management over at Hostess has been giving to its employees in the past couple of weeks. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage on the topic here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in not time at all, “For the curious it turns out that the people over at hostess employ slightly more than 18,000 workers, which sounds like good news for the economy right? Wrong. The company just sent layoff notices to all of them. Yes, you read that right the company just sent out more than 18,000 layoff notices to their workers. The notices, which have a time span of about two months before they go into effect, were issued on Friday of last week and Monday of this week.”

Well it looks like a lot of those layoffs are going into effect. The company has begun to file layoff notifications, complete with actual dates, and inform workers in several states that they are going to be out of a job in the near future. The notices, filed with the board on workforce development, or unemployment offices in each state depending on which the state uses for this function, are a way of giving the surrounding community some time to prepare for the layoffs. This is required when a company takes what is called a mass layoff action. This triggers a set of guidelines that must be followed in order to comply with federal law. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff, a mass layoff is when more than 50 people are going to be laid off in a single location at one time. When this happens the government requires the company to give an extended notice period to the workers.

To give you an idea of how bad this is going to be here is a look at what is going on inside one state. In Connecticut the company is looking to close all five of its locations in the state by the 6^th of July and shut down production. The closure of these five facilities in the state will result in the loss of 187 jobs from the company, and 187 more workers on the unemployment payrolls.

There is some talk that the company may simply close down all of its operations entirely in many states. For now the company is no releasing any information on which states are the most likely to get the total job cuts and which may retain some jobs and run at a reduced staffing level. The company is also not giving out any information about what kind of severance benefits they may be giving to workers in order to help them through these difficult times. Given that the company is sinking quickly, they simply may not be able to offer anything in the way of severance or training programs to the departing employees at this time.