Alaska Airlines Files a Hawaii Closure Notice — and the Public Record Doesn't Say How Many Workers Are Affected

Alaska Airlines has filed a WARN closure notice in Hawaii. The notice date is November 2, 2026, and the effective date is December 31, 2026. The filing is official, published through the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. What the public record does not say is how many workers are affected, or where in Hawaii they work. Both fields read "unavailable."

What the filing shows

The facts on the record are short. The employer is Alaska Airlines, Inc. The event type is a closure. The notice date is November 2, 2026. The effective date is December 31, 2026. The source is the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, via labor.hawaii.gov. The worker count is unavailable. The locality is unavailable.

The gap between the notice date and the effective date is 59 days — one day under the 60 days the federal WARN Act generally requires for a qualifying mass layoff or plant closing. Two caveats: the registry's notice date is the publication date, and workers may have been told earlier or later; and whether the 60-day rule binds a given filing depends on the details of the planned action. The filing states no reason for the closure.

This is a separate filing from the Alaska Airlines notice in Washington, reported separately, which covers 121 workers in Seattle, Spokane, and Renton with the same December 31 effective date. The Hawaii filing stands on its own, with its own dates and its own missing fields.

Hawaii's missing-counts problem

The Alaska Airlines filing is not an exception in Hawaii. It is the pattern. In the last 365 days, Hawaii's imported archive contains 35 official filings, reporting a total of 4 affected workers. Thirty-four of those 35 filings carry no worker count at all. Across the full archive, 501 of 507 notices have unavailable worker counts.

The consequence shows up in the annual totals. Hawaii's 2026 figures read as 36 notices and 720 reported workers — but every one of those 720 workers comes from just six filings:

• First Insurance Company of Hawaii, Honolulu — 212 workers, effective October 1, 2026
• Good Samaritan Society – Pohai Nani, Kaneohe — 185 workers, effective October 31, 2026
• Ali'i Health Center, Kailua Kona — 140 workers, effective October 1, 2026
• Festival Fun Parks — 117 workers, effective October 18, 2026
• Amentum, Schofield Barracks — 62 workers, effective October 31, 2026
• Laie Water Company — 4 workers, notice date September 25, 2026

Five of the six are secondary records from the WARN Feed; only Laie Water's 4 workers come from an official filing with a published count. The other 30 notices filed in Hawaii in 2026 report zero workers between them — not because no one was affected, but because the counts were never published.

These are reported plans, not confirmed job losses, and the final number can change before the effective date. But in Hawaii, the more basic problem comes first: for most filings, the planned number was never published at all.

The December 31 cluster keeps growing

The Alaska Airlines filing lands on the busiest single effective date on the current calendar. December 31, 2026 now carries at least 2,460 workers across five filings with published counts: AEG Management in Oakland with 1,605, the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia with 634, Chick-fil-A in Oxnard with 87, iLEAD in Lancaster with 119, and Family Endeavors in Pennsylvania with 15. Three more Hawaii filings share the same effective date with no published count: Alaska Airlines, DFS Group (notice October 30, 2026), and Ben Bridge – Jeweler (notice October 15, 2026). The true December 31 total is higher than 2,460 by an unknown amount.

A shared effective date does not mean the filings are connected; each stands on its own. What the cluster shows is how much planned activity is concentrated on one year-end date — and how much of it Hawaii's reporting gaps hide.

Hawaii's own notice law, and how to read the numbers

Hawaii workers are covered by more than the federal WARN Act. The state's mini-WARN law, Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapter 394B, requires 60 days' notice, provides a dislocated worker allowance, and carries a penalty of $500 a day for violations. Whether a particular filing meets those standards is a question for the employer, the state labor department, and, if needed, a lawyer — not for a data registry.

Workers named in a filing like this one should check with their employer, their union representative if they have one, and the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations to confirm the details the public record omits.

Hawaii's registry page lists 507 non-cancelled imported notices, with 4 future effective dates, and the newest official notice date is November 2, 2026 — the Alaska Airlines filing. The right way to read those totals is as a floor, not a picture. When 34 of 35 recent official filings report no worker count, the published total counts only the filings that happened to include one. Until Hawaii publishes counts with its notices, the state's layoff totals will keep understating what its own filings describe.

Nationally, the 90-day window holds 680 notices covering 64,883 reported workers. California leads with 20,969, followed by Washington with 17,411. The six weeks ahead total 29,102 scheduled workers, and the week of November 19, at 8,412, remains the heaviest.

Data source: Layoff Atlas.