Companies are fleeing, residents are bolting, colleges are closing, hospitals are bleeding, and the federal government is rerouting our funding to red states. Inside the unraveling of the Bay State’s future—and why the clock is ticking for all of us.
It was hardly a surprise. The parade of departures in Massachusetts has become almost routine. New Hampshire politicians spent last year’s holiday season gloating over their latest gifts: business transplants like the 250 employees of power equipment manager SynQor, formerly of Boxborough, and security and healthcare technology company Analogic, gone from Peabody with 500 jobs in tow. Massachusetts’ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act tracker reported an unusually high toll in January: 905 employees canned at 10 companies, from CRRC (the once-touted Chinese subway-car manufacturer whose woes have stalled MBTA service) and biotech stalwarts Takeda and Thermo Fisher to Zipcar—born in Cambridge in 2000, the kind of startup that Massachusetts used to mint and hold onto—and soup-and-sandwich staple Panera.
Other large layoffs can be traced back to last year. Sarepta Therapeutics slashed nearly 500 Massachusetts jobs, pharmaceutical giant GSK moved operations from Cambridge to Pennsylvania, and Symbotic, a Wilmington-based AI robotics firm—exactly the type of company Massachusetts is supposed to be incubating—cut 400 workers from its Andover facility. In December, Yankee Candle—the South Deerfield icon that built a tourist empire on scented wax—saw its parent company slash 900 jobs and shutter stores nationwide. Another Massachusetts original dramatically downsized.
