A local North Jersey manufacturer and a banking giant are laying off nearly 200 people combined in the coming weeks, according to public notices filed with the New Jersey Department of Labor.
The first is Spiral Binding, a plastic fabrication company in Totowa that is letting go of 137 employees on Oct. 27 due to a “complete cessation of operations,” according to the public notice, known as a WARN notice.
The second is Citibank, which is laying off 52 employees between Oct. 21 and Nov. 9 who are tied to the company’s Jersey City office.
In 2024, Citi said it would lay off 187 employees across Jersey City, Rutherford, Short Hills, Paramus, Hoboken and Fort Lee.
Reuters reported last year that Citigroup would be cutting 20,000 staff over the next two years as part of a broader push to save $2.5 billion.
“While the fourth quarter was very disappointing due to the impact of notable items, we made substantial progress simplifying Citi and executing our strategy in 2023,” Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in a 2024 earnings call.
An archived Herald News photo showing Stephan A. Roth, Executive Vice President of Spiral Binding Company, Inc. in Totowa holding a plastic comb, or binder, approximately four feet long. The company was celebrating their 75th anniversary that year.
The recently announced layoffs “are part of our overall technology strategy, which is focused on streamlining how we operate” and “reducing reliance on third-party contractors,” Citi spokesperson Graham Buck said in a statement. Buck said Citi still employs about 3,000 people in New Jersey.
Representatives from Spiral Binding in Totowa did not return requests for comment, but a Google search lists the location as “permanently closed.”
A story in The Record in 1997 called Spiral Binding “one of New Jersey’s largest producers of loose-leaf binders, laminating films and presentation products.” The company began more than 90 years ago.
Other NJ banking giants hand out the pink slip
Prudential Financial, based in Newark, is laying off 57 employees this summer and fall in New Jersey’s largest city, after handing over 600 workers the pink slip last year.
Meanwhile JPMorgan Chase is planning a fourth round of layoffs at its Jersey City offices in 2025, the nation’s largest bank said in public filings.
And British banking giant Barclays said it would lay off 78 employees in June and July, on top of 69 who were handed pink slips in January.
James Hughes, an economist at Rutgers University, previously told NorthJersey.com that white collar jobs in banking and finance have become saturated after a two-year hiring spree that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.
Layoffs surged in 2025
According to a NorthJersey.com analysis, 28 New Jersey businesses announced layoffs of a combined 3,618 workers in the first quarter of 2025, more than double the 1,753 announced by 18 companies during the same period in 2024.
In the second quarter of 2025, 26 companies said they were laying off a combined 4,567 employees, up from the 32 companies laying off 3,892 employees during the same period in 2024, a separate NorthJersey.com analysis found.
Those numbers come as businesses grapple with the immediate impacts and future unknowns of on-again, off-again tariffs on imports from the United States’ historic trading partners, an uneasy trade war truce with China, drastically fluctuating markets, weak jobs reports, rapid onset of artificial intelligence and its replacement of white collar workers, the governor’s race in New Jersey and the potential economic fallout from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax cuts.
Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record.
Email: munozd@northjersey.com; Twitter:@danielmunoz100 and Facebook
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Citibank, Spiral Binding to cut 200 North Jersey jobs
