Twenty-eight New Jersey businesses announced layoffs of a combined 3,618 workers in the first quarter of 2025, more than double the 1,753 layoffs announced by 118 companies during the same period in 2024.
This quarter’s numbers come as businesses grapple with the immediate impacts and future unknowns of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from the United States’ historic trading partners, spending cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the governor’s race in New Jersey…
For 2019, the average monthly job gain was 166,000 jobs, so these recent numbers indicate “that the labor market remained strong,” said James Hughes, an economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
“However, the major question going forward is whether this is the last positive month … before the tariff turmoil slows the economy,” Hughes said.
The layoff figure of 3,618 pink slips across 28 New Jersey companies was gleaned from public filings made with the New Jersey Department of Labor, known as Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications, or WARN notices.
These were the number of layoffs announced in the first quarter going back to the end of the pandemic:
Q1 2025: 3,618
Q1 2024: 1,753
Q1 2023: 3,848
Q1 2022: 1,365
“We may have seen in 2023 a sharp increase in quarterly layoffs and the like” because of inflation and higher interest rates, said Hughes, the Rutgers economist.
“We may see the same thing in 2025” because of the impact of Trump’s tariffs, he said. “It almost seems like we’re in another panic.”