Legal Research

Researching Layoff Data

In her Wisconsin Law Journal blog, Bev Butula offers tips for researching layoff information. One of the databases she mentions is JWT Inside's Layoff Report Database.

The researcher can search by week or keyword. The weekly report lists the various companies, locations, affected workforce, news source, and date of the layoffs for that particular week.

Refinement by industry, metropolitan area (includes Canada), headcount, or date range is available. These results first provide a list of the company, date, and industry. Selection of a particular company will then take the user to the news story. It appears that the database goes back to the late 1990's.

To give you a flavor for what's included, see the screenshot below of a search I did for layoffs in the Madison area in the last year.

Bev also suggests the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Mass Layoff Statistics site.

The main webpage provides instant statistics on the right hand side of page (with an RSS feed). The page also offers links to the various databases to query and tables. Like many BLS tools, these databases are very dynamic and provide an extensive amount of information.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on December 30, 2008 (boomark / email).