NJ layoffs top 10,800 in 2026 — would you follow your job?

"I'm movin' out." Billy Joel wrote that as a personal statement of independence. Increasingly in New Jersey, it sounds like a corporate memo.

Samsung Electronics America just announced 739 layoffs out of its Englewood Cliffs offices, effective the end of September, as the company relocates its U.S. headquarters to Texas. Around the same time, Mars Wrigley announced it is closing its Newark headquarters entirely, cutting 307 jobs and moving corporate operations to Chicago, ending an 80-plus year presence in the city. Combined, that is 1,000 jobs gone from two well-known New Jersey employers within days of each other. Add in 282 layoffs at Verizon and 172 at JPMorgan Chase in Jersey City, and this year's statewide layoff total has now climbed past 10,800.

Numbers like that are easy to scroll past in a headline. They get a lot harder to scroll past when you know someone living inside one of them.

My father-in-law's answer

Years ago, my father-in-law worked for a company near Philadelphia that decided to relocate to North Carolina. He was offered the chance to go with it — same job, same company, a paycheck waiting for him on the other end. He said no. He was not willing to uproot his family and start completely over in a town he had no roots in, no matter what the job offer looked like on paper. New Jersey and the Philadelphia area were home. He stayed, and he figured the rest out from there.

That decision has been on my mind a lot lately, because a version of it landed on my own doorstep more recently than I usually admit out loud.

My own answer

In January 2025, I lost my radio job in Philadelphia. I was out of work for about six months — long enough that it felt considerably longer in real time than it reads as a sentence now. During that stretch, I was staring down a genuine choice: leave the radio industry I have loved for 48 years in order to stay local, or leave New Jersey and the Philadelphia region entirely to chase a job in the field I actually wanted to stay in.

I chose to stay. I applied to Trader Joe's, twice, and did not get hired either time — not qualified, apparently, for a job I would have taken gladly to keep my family rooted where we were. I was fortunate. New Jersey 101.5 brought me back a year ago, and I am sitting here writing this because of that. Not everyone gets that ending. A lot of people are out of work far longer than six months, and a lot of them do not get the call back.

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The question this raises for a lot of people right now

If Samsung or Mars Wrigley had told you, personally, that your job was staying intact but your desk was moving to Texas or Chicago, what would you actually do? Some people will go. Career first, roots second, especially if there are not young kids in the mix or aging parents nearby who need you close. Others will do exactly what my father-in-law did — stay, and figure out the next chapter from right where they already are, because the job was never actually the thing holding them here in the first place.

New Jersey's business advocates have been sounding alarms about this pattern all year. NJBIA CEO Michele Siekerka called this latest round of departures another warning sign that the state needs to seriously address its business climate. Others have pointed to this year's state budget, which raised some business taxes and trimmed corporate deductions, as part of what is pushing companies toward the exits. Whether that is the real driver or one factor among several is a genuine, ongoing debate in Trenton, and I am not going to pretend I have the definitive answer sitting here.

What I do know is this. Behind every one of those 10,800 layoff numbers is somebody facing the exact question my father-in-law faced, and the exact question I faced eighteen months ago. Follow the job, or stay for the life you already built around it.

There is no universally right answer. There is only the one that is right for your family, in your specific moment, weighed against roots that, for a lot of us in this state, run deeper than any paycheck ever could.