The company cut 177 jobs in January of this year, four months after it was bought by Sycamore Partners in a highly publicised sale and became a private business.
As WBJournal reports, the workers “are eligible for financial benefits because their jobs were deemed lost because of increased imports, according to a legal notice.”
A U.S. Department of Labour ruling found that the employees who lost their jobs “supplied internal information-technology data” and implied “that the laid off workers’ jobs may have been shifted overseas.”
The layoffs were made “under the radar” by the office retailer, with Staples apparently not filing a notice “to the state of the layoffs through a legal requirement called the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act.” The state’s Department of Labour and Workforce Development noted that it had not received such a notice.
News of the layoff only emerged in recent weeks, when a legal notice filed with the state revealed that “the Department of Labour had determined in early March that laid off Staples workers, or those who were working for Staples for other firms, had been “adversely impacted by increased imports.”
Staples’ Director of Corporate Communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment on the layoffs.
