Florence, Alabama: 144 Jobs Gone, Then the WARN Notice Arrived

Florence, Alabama: 144 Jobs Gone, Then the WARN Notice Arrived

Rickwood Road, Florence, Alabama. A ceramic tile plant there stopped running on Friday 16 October 2026. Three days later the state logged it. Entry twelve of Alabama's 2026 WARN series reads: Closure, initial report date 10/19/2026, planned starting date 10/16/2026, DAL-TILE LLC, Florence, 144 employees. On the state's own record the closure begins three days before the state is told about it. Federal law asks for sixty calendar days.

This report works only from documents that were opened and hashed while it was made: Alabama's published WARN list and its CSV data feed, 20 CFR Part 639, 29 U.S.C. 2104 as published by the Government Publishing Office, Mohawk Industries' Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 4 July 2026 on SEC EDGAR, the Census Bureau and HUD new residential construction release for September 2026, the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages file for Lauderdale County, and named local reporting from the Florence TimesDaily, WAFF and FOX54.

Three findings you can check yourself. First, across all 1,076 rows of Alabama's WARN list the median gap between the initial report date and the planned starting date is 59 days, 595 entries carry under 60 days, and 120 are zero or negative. Second, the one BLS industry row precise enough to size this closure, ceramic wall and floor tile manufacturing in Lauderdale County, shows a single establishment and no employment figure at all, withheld under the disclosure rules that protect an individual employer. Third, Mohawk's own quarterly filing reports Global Ceramic sales to United States customers up 7.5 percent over the half year and segment operating income up 15.4 million dollars, alongside a new group of restructuring projects announced in the second quarter of 2026 worth about 60 million dollars of cost reduction, in a filing that says its cost-reduction initiatives typically involve site closings and other facility rationalization actions.

Where the record does not establish something, this report says so. We did not obtain the WARN letter itself; everything about its contents is what named outlets reported. The column is labelled initial report date, which records when the state logged the report rather than when the employer signed it, so a short gap is not by itself proof of anything. The state record says 144 affected and several outlets said 146. Mohawk's filing never names Florence or any individual plant. Whether any WARN exception applies, and whether anyone owes anything, is for a court.

[CHAPTERS]
0:00 - Rickwood Road, and one line on a state file
0:37 - What the record actually says
2:12 - The reason given, and the rest of the filing
4:01 - The county the data is not allowed to show
6:08 - What you can actually do this week