The company has announced that it is going to cut back on about 1,300 workers in the Huston area. The company will also be cutting back on routes coming out of airport in Huston. This loss of jobs is going to represent a cut of about 10 percent of the workers who are currently at the facility.

These cuts will be more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”
Once a layoff qualifies as a mass layoff action it triggers a special set of rules. Under those rules the workers are given a longer span of notice. That notice is designed to give workers enough time to try and look for other work, or at least to scrape together some savings since they know that their job is going to be gone soon. It is also used as a buffer to help the surrounding community to brace for the loss of revenue. Though in the current economic downturn there is the very large chance that the workers will not find any work in the allotted time.

For the time being the company is not giving out any information about when the layoffs will go into effect, or what kind of severance benefits that the company is planning to give to the workers who are going to be displaced in the current wave of layoffs.