Johnson & Johnson is laying off 231 employees in New Jersey and Bayer is cutting 57 positions in the state, according to separate Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings from the companies.
Both companies confirmed the reductions. J&J’s cuts will take place at its corporate headquarters in New Brunswick. Bayer’s layoffs are another round of cuts this year at its U.S. headquarters in Whippany.
Neither company expanded on which staffers would be affected. The cuts for both companies become effective on Dec. 27 of this year.
In its WARN filing, J&J referred to the cuts as “organizational changes due to business needs.”
“To continue to meet the needs of patients around the world today and for years to come, we must adapt and evolve our businesses in the midst of a complex and rapidly changing external environment,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Meanwhile, Bayer’s layoffs come on top of the sacking of 90 at the Whippany site in March and 70 more in July.
“We are adopting a new operating model and with it, a new organizational structure," Bayer's spokesperson said in a statement. "Our new organizational approach will enable more agility, empower employees to innovate and act, deepen the focus on our mission."
Bayer is still digging out from its disastrous $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, which brought with it legal claims, now numbering in the tens of thousands, that the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer.
The company is undergoing a major reorganization, dubbed “dynamic shared ownership,” which was designed by CEO Bill Anderson to reduce levels of bureaucracy at the struggling conglomerate. In August, the company revealed that it had eliminated 3,200 positions in the first half of 2024 after starting the year with a head count of 101,369.
In March, Anderson shook up the executive team for Bayer’s pharma sector, reducing the leadership roster from 14 to eight executives. Three members of the executive team were let go, while the three others were demoted. In January, Bayer executed a similar overhaul of its crop science sector, dismissing three execs, each with at least 27 years of experience at the company.
Layoffs will continue into 2025, Bayer has said, with the goal to save the company 500 million euros ($541 million) in operating expenses this year and 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) in 2026.
Two weeks ago, amid its own savings drive, Bristol Myers Squibb confirmed a WARN filing that it was cutting 79 jobs in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where it has two facilities including its headquarters. The round of pink slips raised the company’s layoff count in Lawrenceville to 1,134 this year.