The Non-Financial Ledger: What Gets Stolen When Your Job Disappears Overnight

Julian Hagins worked for Paramount and CBS Interactive from March 2022 through September 2024. He did his job remotely from his home in Orange, California, with his managers Jeremy Westphal, Andy Sarnow, and Steve Raizes sitting in an office in Manhattan, handing out assignments, running evaluations, making the calls. He was a real employee with a real job. Then on September 24, 2024, that was over. Six days later, so was his income.

Six days. That is what Paramount considered sufficient notice for a man to restructure his entire financial life. No 90-day window to start applying for jobs while still being paid. No realistic buffer to keep health insurance continuous. No time to negotiate anything. Just a notification, and then a countdown.

Think about what 60 days of wages actually means in practice. It is two months of rent. It is the gap between a lapsed health insurance plan and a new one. It is two months of 401(k) contributions toward a retirement that gets a little more precarious every time a corporation decides a layoff looks better on an earnings report than a structured wind-down. The New York WARN Act exists specifically because lawmakers recognized that corporations, left to their own judgment, will always choose speed and cost savings over the stability of their workforce. The law is a floor, a legal minimum, and Paramount allegedly did not clear it.

For the 50 to 60 workers at the surrounding W. 57th Street facilities, there is an additional layer of indignity. These are employees who may never even appear by name in the official NYDOL WARN Notice filing. They are numbers. They are “approximately.” The lawsuit itself acknowledges that the precise count of affected workers is information held entirely by Paramount. The workers do not know how many of them there are. Only the corporation knows, and they have every financial incentive to make that number as small as possible.

Remote workers face a specific vulnerability that this case makes visible. Hagins lived in California but his work life was anchored to New York. His supervisors were in New York. His assignments came from New York. His employment protections are New York protections. But when the layoff came, he had no colleagues in the building to hear the news from first, no union hall to walk into, no HR office to confront in person. He found out the same way everyone finds out in 2024: a notification, probably on a laptop screen, in a house in Orange, California, thousands of miles from the people who made the decision.

The law is not ambiguous here. New York’s WARN Act is stricter than the federal version. Ninety days notice, or sixty days pay. That is the deal. Paramount’s own NYDOL WARN Notice filing is cited as an exhibit in the complaint. They filed the notice. They knew the rule existed. They chose not to follow it.

Legal Receipts: What the Complaint Actually Says

The complaint filed October 3, 2024 in the Southern District of New York speaks precisely. These are the operative allegations, drawn directly from the source document.

“On or about September 24, 2024, Defendants Paramount Global and CBS Interactive Inc. terminated the employment of Julian Hagins and more than 300 other employees who worked at and/or reported to their headquarters at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan, as well as other operating locations in close geographic proximity to Headquarters. Defendants provided written notification of the termination, which was effective on or about September 30, 2024, i.e., far less than the 90 days’ advanced notice required under New York WARN.”

• This establishes the core violation: written notice was given, but the gap between that notice and the effective termination date was far less than the 90 days New York law requires.
• The language “far less than” is deliberate. The actual gap was approximately six days, placing Paramount not in a gray area of the law, but in clear, documented non-compliance.

“Plaintiff and the other approximately 294 employees who worked at or reported (either in-person or remote) to Headquarters as well as another approximately 50-60 employees who worked out of surrounding worksites at 513, 518, 524, 530, or 555 W. 57th St., New York, New York were notified by Defendants that their employment was terminated, effective on or about September 30, 2024.”

• The complaint identifies six distinct physical locations where workers were affected, including five addresses on W. 57th Street in addition to the main Broadway headquarters.
• The inclusion of remote workers is legally significant: the complaint explicitly states that workers who reported virtually to headquarters fall within the same NY WARN protections as those physically present in the building.

“Defendants are together a single employer and an integrated entity, in that they share the same or similar facilities (Headquarters and Surrounding Facilities), the same or similar employees, possessed common financial ownership and control, and common human resources and management personnel.”

• The “single employer” allegation is strategically important. If Paramount and CBS Interactive are treated as legally distinct employers, each might argue its individual headcount falls below the threshold triggering WARN protections. Treating them as one integrated entity forecloses that defense.
• The complaint’s four-part test for integration covers facilities, employees, financial ownership, and HR/management, covering every structural element courts typically examine in single-employer analyses.

“NY WARN states that if an employer provides any employee with less than 90 days advanced notification of a plant shutdown or mass layoff, the employer shall provide that employee with 60 calendar days of wages and benefits. NYLL § 860-g.”

• This is the statute. The remedy is automatic and specific: 60 days of wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, accrued holiday and vacation pay, pension and 401(k) contributions, and healthcare coverage, calculated as if the worker remained employed during that period.
• The complaint seeks this for every class member. The total exposure for Paramount scales directly with how many workers are in the class and what each of them earned.

Societal Impact Mapping: This Is Bigger Than One Layoff

Public Health

The abrupt loss of employer-sponsored health insurance is a direct, documented public health harm. When workers lose coverage without the 90-day buffer the law requires, the consequences are immediate and specific.

• Each of the 300-plus terminated workers lost healthcare coverage on September 30, 2024. Any worker without COBRA enrolled, or without resources to fund COBRA premiums out of pocket, faced an immediate coverage gap with no warning period to arrange alternatives.
• The 60 days of healthcare contributions owed under NY WARN § 860-g are explicitly intended to bridge this gap. By not providing them, Paramount allegedly left workers to absorb those costs or go uninsured during the most financially vulnerable period of their professional lives.
• For workers managing chronic conditions, ongoing prescriptions, or scheduled medical procedures, the sudden loss of coverage is a medical emergency created by an HR calendar decision. The complaint’s demand for healthcare benefit continuation is acknowledgment that this harm is real and quantifiable.

Economic Inequality

The structure of this violation systematically advantages the corporation and disadvantages individual workers, illustrating exactly why WARN Act protections were created in the first place.

• The lawsuit acknowledges directly that “the amounts at stake for many of the Class Members, while substantial, are not great enough to enable them to maintain separate suits against Defendants.” This is the power imbalance the class action mechanism is designed to counteract. Without it, Paramount could simply wait out individuals who cannot afford litigation against a multinational corporation.
• Remote workers like lead plaintiff Julian Hagins face compounded economic disadvantage. Working from California, he had no geographic or social proximity to the New York labor market where these decisions were made. He bore the full economic shock of an abrupt termination while being structurally isolated from the professional networks and institutions that might buffer it.
• Paramount Global employs over 7,000 people in New York State alone, as confirmed in its own NYDOL WARN Notice filing. The financial calculation here is stark: the cost of complying with WARN, either by giving 90 days notice or paying 60 days of wages and benefits, is a line item. For 300 workers, it is a significant amount of money. For a company with Paramount’s scale, it is a rounding error on an earnings report. The asymmetry is the injustice.
• The 401(k) and pension contribution losses are not merely dollar amounts. They are compounding losses. Contributions not made in late 2024 are contributions that will not grow over decades of investment returns. For workers in middle-income positions, this kind of retirement-account disruption has long-term consequences that dwarf the immediate wage loss.

The Cost of a Life: Putting the Numbers in Human Terms

What Now: How to Push Back and Who Is Watching

The legal mechanism is in motion. Here is what matters next and who has authority over these corporations.

Named Defendants in This Case

• Paramount Global: Delaware for-profit corporation, headquartered at 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036. Named defendant and alleged primary decision-maker in the mass layoff.
• CBS Interactive Inc.: Delaware for-profit corporation, headquartered at 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036. Named co-defendant, alleged to operate as a single integrated employer with Paramount.
• Jeremy Westphal, Andy Sarnow, Steve Raizes: Named in the complaint as direct supervisors of lead plaintiff Julian Hagins, located in-person at HQ and responsible for his assignments and performance evaluations.

Class Counsel

• James E. Goodley and Ryan P. McCarthy, Goodley McCarthy LLC, 1650 Market Street, Suite 3600, Philadelphia, PA 19103. Tel: (215) 394-0541. If you are a former Paramount or CBS Interactive employee terminated around this period and believe you are a class member, contacting class counsel is the correct first step.

Regulatory Watchlist

• New York State Department of Labor (NYDOL): The agency that receives WARN Act filings. The complaint’s Exhibit A is the NYDOL WARN Notice filed by Defendants. NYDOL has administrative oversight over WARN compliance in New York State.
• U.S. Department of Labor (DOL): Federal labor oversight authority. While the complaint is filed under New York’s WARN Act (which is stricter than the federal WARN Act), DOL monitors mass layoff data nationally and has investigative authority over federal labor law compliance.
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): Relevant if any patterns emerge suggesting that termination selection was not entirely neutral across protected classes.
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Paramount Global is a publicly traded corporation. Material workforce reductions and related litigation are disclosable events. Investors and watchdogs should monitor SEC filings for how this liability is characterized.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): Relevant to any organizing activity among remaining Paramount workers and to the broader question of whether rapid mass layoffs are being used to chill worker organizing.

What You Can Do

• If you were terminated: Contact Goodley McCarthy LLC directly at (215) 394-0541 or james@gmlaborlaw.com. The class period covers workers terminated without NY WARN-compliant notice between approximately August 25, 2024 and October 24, 2024, at Paramount and CBS Interactive headquarters and surrounding facilities.
• If you are a current Paramount employee: Know your rights under NY WARN and document your employment status, supervisor names, and work location. If a future layoff occurs, you now know the 90-day notice requirement exists and what remedies attach when it is violated.
• Support worker organizing: The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and SAG-AFTRA both have active organizing and advocacy work in media and tech industries. Connecting with these organizations builds collective bargaining capacity that makes WARN Act violations harder to execute without consequence.
• Mutual aid networks: If you know workers affected by this layoff who are navigating a healthcare gap right now, connecting them with local mutual aid organizations, community health centers accepting uninsured patients, or state healthcare exchange enrollment assistance is immediate, tangible support.
• Monitor the docket: Case No. 1:24-cv-07493 in the Southern District of New York is a public record. PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) allows anyone to track filings, class certification decisions, and any settlement announcements as this case progresses.