Every week during this recession, employers that are cutting staff file notices with state officials giving details about the layoffs, as required by federal law.

Some letters to fulfill the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act signal that the lives of dozens or hundreds of employees and their families will be disrupted.

One recent letter warns of a "mass layoff" affecting four workers. The move points to a hard truth of the recession: Companies continue to make job cuts, big and small.

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, which employs 29 at its offices in Morrisville, plans to eliminate four software engineers, according to its WARN letter sent to the N.C. Department of Commerce.

The California company will try to find other jobs within Genesys for the affected employees. If that doesn't happen, they will be terminated on Oct. 21.

Genesys has been a division of the French corporation Alcatel-Lucent since 2000. The company makes software for businesses' customer-service centers.