Western Digital
WDCThe Filing Footprint Is Bigger Than One Legal Name
Western Digital needs to be read through its public employer-name boundary: Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the DOL records, including one misspelled source-row variant.
Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 3,018 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 3,032. FY2025 alone accounts for 235 LCA filings.
The USCIS series shown here totals 697 approvals across the available approval rows. Where FY2025 rows are initial approvals only, the page labels them that way. LCA filings are not headcount, hired workers, or proof that a specific American worker was replaced.
3 total denials across all years (0.1% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.
The Employer Boundary Drives the Count
Western Digital Technologies, Inc. is the largest filing name, but the full public footprint depends on combining the affiliated employer rows used for this page.
The peak year in the full-year series is FY2021, with 824 filings. FY2026 currently shows 14 rows and should be read as a partial-year value, not as a final decline.
This site no longer charts H-1B filings as a share of workforce. The ratio can blur U.S. employees, global employees, contractors, and offshore delivery headcount into one denominator.
Rows with a disclosed U.S.-employee denominator available here: 0. The analysis now uses filings, approvals, wage, worksite, and title concentration instead.
Workforce Context, Kept in Bounds
WARN-notice tracking attributes 2,308 laid-off workers across 27 notices to Western Digital between April 2015 and January 2026, concentrated in California and Utah. Over the same period the company's visa filings cleared essentially without friction, with a 99% approval rate on its 2024 LCAs. The sponsored roles are hardware-heavy, Senior Engineer Industrial Engineering and Staff Engineer Hardware Development, clustered in Milpitas, San Jose, Fremont, and Irvine. The public record does not connect any specific layoff to any specific sponsored hire; what it shows is a company shedding U.S. workers by the thousand while the sponsorship pipeline never slowed.
The public workforce story belongs next to the filing volume, but it does not turn every LCA into a replacement claim.
No enforcement action against Western Digital appears in the records used here, and the WARN data does not identify which workers were affected.
The Labor-Market Signal Is in the Job Mix
The leading occupation is Electronics Engineers, Except Computer, and the leading job title is Senior Engineer, Industrial Engineering; those roles show what part of the labor market the filings reach.
For FY2025, the average H-1B wage in the filtered salary extract is $135,661, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $130,589. That is a $5,072 spread over the legal wage floor.
Where the Filings Reach the U.S. Labor Market
Milpitas, Ca leads the mapped worksite list with 1,039 rows for this employer boundary.
Green Cards Add the Long-Term Tie
The PERM layer adds 328 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, including 34 in FY2025.
PERM records are a different process from H-1B petitions, but they matter because the sponsorship timeline can tie a worker to an employer for years.
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| Title | Count |
|---|---|
| Senior Engineer, Industrial Engineering | 211 |
| Staff Engineer, Hardware Development Engineering | 153 |
| Staff Engineer, R&d Engineering | 144 |
| Senior Engineer, Electronic Design Engineering | 99 |
| Principal Engineer, R&d Engineering | 78 |
| Staff Engineer, Product Design Engineering | 71 |
| Staff Engineer, Industrial Engineering | 69 |
| Principal Engineer, Firmware Engineering | 66 |
- LCA filings and salary data: DOL OFLC disclosure rows mapped by the employer-name boundary used for this investigation.
- H-1B approvals: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub CSV rows for FY2020-FY2023, plus FY2025 hub initial approvals where available.
- PERM data: DOL OFLC PERM disclosure rows mapped with the same employer-name boundary.
- WARNtracker aggregation of Western Digital WARN notices, April 2015 to January 2026; MyVisaJobs employer profile, retrieved July 2026.
- BLS wage comparison: OEWS May 2023 national median for software developers.
Caveat: LCA filings are not H-1B petitions or hired workers. FY2025 USCIS hub rows are initial approvals only, so denial rates are not computed for those rows.