Three employers have told state labor departments they plan to cut 577 jobs: Bristol Myers Squibb in Princeton, New Jersey, the auto-parts retailer Pep Boys in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and a Pepsi bottler in Hyattsville, Maryland. The notices are WARN filings, made under a law that requires advance warning of large layoffs. The layoffs are scheduled between November 2026 and May 2027.
Adding up the three notices
The 577 is a sum of three separate filings in three states: 265 at Bristol Myers Squibb, 169 at Pep Boys and 143 at the Pepsi bottler. The arithmetic is 265 plus 169 plus 143, which equals 577. No single employer or state accounts for it, and the notices do not describe a coordinated event.
The employers are in unrelated industries: pharmaceuticals, automotive retail and beverage manufacturing. The pages read for this article state the numbers and dates but no reason for the reductions, so none is offered here.
Bristol Myers Squibb: 265 in Princeton
New Jersey’s 2026 WARN notice archive lists Bristol Myers Squibb in Princeton, posted in September, with 265 affected workers. The effective dates run from Dec. 17, 2026, through May 21, 2027, which means the reductions are staged over about five months rather than on one day.
The same archive shows other September entries from the drug industry. Johnson & Johnson Services lists 87 workers in New Brunswick effective Dec. 18, 2026, and Merck lists 54 in Rahway. Adding the two to Bristol’s 265 gives 406 (265 plus 87 plus 54) across three drug companies in New Jersey. That total is separate from the 577 in the headline, which draws on three employers in three states.
Pep Boys: 169 at the Bala Cynwyd headquarters
Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor & Industry posts its WARN notices by employer. The entry for Pep Boys Manny Moe & Jack, LLC lists 169 affected workers in Bala Cynwyd, Montgomery County, with the layoff running from Dec. 31, 2026, to Feb. 19, 2027. The entry is labeled a layoff rather than a closure.
That labeling matters to a household. A layoff notice covers jobs that are being eliminated, while a closure notice covers a site shutting down, and the entry for Pep Boys uses the first term. The filing does not identify which positions are affected, and it lists no job titles.
A Pepsi bottler: 143 in Hyattsville
Maryland’s Department of Labor keeps a WARN log on which the legal name appears as CB Manufacturing, Inc., doing business as Pepsi Beverages, at 2611 Pepsi Place in Hyattsville. It lists 143 affected workers, an effective date of Nov. 13, 2026, and the type “Mass Layoff- No Recall.” The label suggests that the workers are not expected to be recalled.
Of the three, Hyattsville has the earliest date and the smallest number, 143 workers. It is also the nearest, at about six weeks from the day this article publishes.
What the WARN Act requires of these employers
The U.S. Department of Labor’s plant closings and layoffs page says the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act calls for “at least 60 calendar days advance written notice” of a plant closing or mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site. It applies to employers with 100 or more employees. Notice goes to affected workers or their representatives, local officials and the state dislocated-worker unit.
The rule explains why the three filings could precede the layoffs by weeks or months. It also explains why smaller cuts do not show up in the logs: a reduction below the threshold at one site need not be filed. The Labor Department lists exceptions for unforeseeable business circumstances, faltering companies and natural disasters.
Counting back 60 days from each date
The 60-day rule lets a reader work out roughly when each employer needed to give notice. Counting back 60 calendar days from the first effective date, the Hyattsville layoff on Nov. 13, 2026, points to about Sept. 14, 2026. The first Pep Boys date, Dec. 31, 2026, points to about Nov. 1, and Bristol Myers Squibb’s first date, Dec. 17, 2026, to about Oct. 18. These are calculations from the published dates, not filing dates taken from the logs.
Maryland’s date is the nearest of the three, so its 60-day window would have opened by mid-September, while the New Jersey and Pennsylvania dates leave more room. Staged layoffs, such as Bristol’s stretch to May 21, 2027, can also mean that workers covered by the same notice leave on different dates.
What a WARN date means for a household
A 60-day notice gives an affected worker time to plan finances: to line up a job search, to review benefits and to build a cushion for the weeks after the last paycheck. It is a planned date, not a guarantee that every listed worker will be let go on it, and the number on the state log may change as the employer finalizes its plans.
The state logs are the primary record here. New Jersey lists Bristol Myers Squibb at 265, Pennsylvania lists Pep Boys at 169 and Maryland lists the Pepsi bottler at 143, and together they make 577.
Frozen accounts, garnished deposits and collector letters
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit is written for households whose money arrives in a bank account that a creditor might freeze or a debt collector might target. It explains the confusion around which deposits are protected and what a collector must produce before pressing a claim.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit is a 10-page kit that includes the 2-month bank protection rule, the debt-validation steps and a protected-funds and dispute log for keeping each notice and deposit in one place.
Start with the frozen-account response in The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit →
This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked against the cited state and federal labor department pages.
