Data from the Texas Workforce Commission indicates that a defense contractor has announced layoffs in its spy plane program in DFW.
One hundred seventy-nine workers in the JAVAMAN Program at L3Harris have received Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification Notices (WARN), according to the Commission’s WARN datasheet.
The notices were seemingly sent to the Rockwall employees on February 24 and will take effect on April 22. There was a slight delay in the announcement and its recording in the WARN datasheet, as the sheet was not updated to include this new information until February 26.
The exact details of the JAVAMAN program remain murky. Military publications, such as The War Zone, refer to JAVAMAN or JAVA MAN as only part of a “Secretive US SpecOps” project connected to the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
U.S. SOCOM has been active since 1987 and executes “global operations against terrorist networks,” according to its factbook.
As recently as 2020, a press release from L3Harris boasted about its JAVAMAN program. “The L3Harris tactical ISR program JAVAMAN recently eclipsed more than 1 million flight hours for a fleet that includes 35 aircraft and flies up to 65 missions per day, 365 days a year in locations throughout the world.”
The fact sheet also said the Florida-based company has approximately 7,900 employees in Texas and described L3Harris as “the second-largest manufacturing company in Texas, where it hosts a diverse portfolio of industry-leading technologies, from global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) solutions, to radar and sensors.”
The Dallas Express reached out for comment, and L3Harris’s media relations officer said that while 179 positions will be eliminated, only 31 will be in Texas. She attributed the layoffs to “the conclusion of the JAVA MAN program.”
Later, the media relations officer added, “We value the contributions of our employees and are working to find opportunities inside the company due to the JAVA MAN program closeout.”
To this officer’s point, although the WARN has been dispatched, it is possible that not all of these workers will be laid off.
“The WARN Act requires employers with 100 or more full-time employees (not counting workers who have fewer than 6 months on the job) to provide at least 60 calendar days advance written notice of a worksite closing affecting 50 or more employees,” per a Department of Labor FAQ.
Given the gap between the WARN issuance and the layoff’s effective date, sometimes layoffs are announced but never executed as a company’s financial situation or priorities change.
Employees have been on edge about layoffs within the organization for months. For at least eight months, numerous discussion threads on the social media platform Reddit have used some iteration of “Layoffs Coming? L3Harris.”
However, the threads do not disclose the user’s location, making it difficult to ascertain which plants these apparent employees might work and where they believed the layoffs would happen.