500+ workers at MD shuttle facility laid off without notice, lawsuit alleges

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A paratransit provider abruptly terminated more than 570 workers and closed a Prince George’s County facility last week but didn’t inform the employees until the day they were laid off, a proposed class-action lawsuit alleges.

Filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Maryland, the complaint alleges that Diamond Transportation Services, Inc. did not give the required 60-days of notice of the plant closure under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statute, also known as the WARN Act.

The Maryland Department of Labor received notice of the closure May 13 — one day after the Landover plant closure’s effective date — according to the agency’s WARN log. According to the complaint, operations were “running business as usual” last Tuesday at the facility on Hubbard Road until union-represented employees learned from their representative that they would be terminated the same day. The firm also notified Virginia officials last Tuesday that a Springfield plant would close effective the same day, affecting 144 more employees.

Spokespeople for the company that owns Diamond Transportation Services, which provides shared-ride services for passengers with disabilities in the Washington metro area, did not return requests for comment. The firm contracts with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to provide shared-ride services for MetroAccess, a program for passengers with disabilities that prevent them from using bus or rail.

In November, the firm notified state labor officials in Virginia and Maryland of another set of mass layoffs at various facilities, including cuts affecting 182 employees at the Landover facility. The firm gave Maryland and Virginia’s labor departments notice of those layoffs roughly 20 days before they became effective, writing to officials that the November cuts were due to a “sudden” decision by the transit authority on Oct. 31, 2025, to reduce the number of routes served by the firm.

ATU Local 689 spokesperson Benjamin Lynn also cast blame on WMATA for the plant closure, noting that it was the third time MetroAccess workers had been laid off since mid-2024. He said that the transit authority “has shifted work from one contractor to another contractor in a haphazard way with limited oversight and little to zero accountability for the contractors’ behavior and treatment of workers.”

A transit authority spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The WARN act requires medium- and large-sized employers to provide 60 days of notice to employees and state labor officials of plant closures causing 50 or more employees to lose employment, as well as other mass layoffs. It grants an exception for layoffs and plant closures caused by “business circumstances that were not reasonably foreseeable” enough time in advance, which Diamond invoked in a letter about the November layoffs.

The law also grants exceptions for closures due to natural disasters as well as instances in which the employer was actively seeking capital to avoid layoffs and believed in good faith that issuing a warning would ruin those talks.

It’s unclear whether Diamond invoked any exceptions to the law in its May notice regarding the Maryland plant closure. The lawsuit alleges that the firm “cannot establish that it had any reasonable grounds or basis for believing its actions were not in violation of the WARN Act.”

Diamond operates under the WeDriveU brand under the Mobico Group, a British public transportation company. Diamond was founded in the 1980s and was purchased in 2016 by National Express Transit, a subsidiary under Mobico.

The plaintiff in the proposed class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday was an employee who had worked for Diamond for about six months, according to the complaint. She is represented by Washington-area personal injury attorney Duane O. King as well as lawyers from Tennessee-based Stranch, Jennings & Garvey PLLC.

The sudden layoffs also seemed to have caught the attention of Chicago-based class action firm Strauss Borrelli PLLC, which said last week that it was investigating Diamond in regard to the layoffs and believed that employees could be entitled to 60 days of severance pay and benefits.

This story has been updated with Lynn’s statement and WMATA’s lack of comment.