WILMINGTON, Delaware (From The News-Journal) -- Just weeks after DuPont Co. announced plans to merge with Dow Chemical, the Delaware company notified employees Tuesday that about 1,700 jobs will be eliminated here by early 2016, marking one of the largest single mass layoffs to hit the First State in recent history.

DuPont Chief Executive Ed Breen announced the layoffs, which account for 28 percent of its current Delaware workforce, in a memo sent to DuPont's roughly 6,100 Delaware employees on Tuesday - just four days after Christmas.

Several hundred of those DuPont employees will receive notice in January that their jobs are being eliminated; others were notified earlier this month.

All 1,700 workers are expected to leave the company by the end of March.

Breen said he chose to announce the full scope of the job cuts now - even before many employees have received a pink slip - because DuPont is required to detail the layoffs in a state filing due by Thursday.

DuPont provided no additional details about the filing, but it is believed to be a notice required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which demands that employers give notice of a mass layoff. The triggers for filing depends on several factors.

"Especially given that we are in the middle of the holidays, we would have preferred to wait until individual notifications were complete before reporting the full local impact," Breen wrote in the memo. "... I wanted you to hear the difficult news - directly from me."

Although DuPont will eliminate more than 1 in 4 of its positions in Delaware, the company is not expected to shutter any of its local facilities, company officials said. Those facilities include DuPont's Chestnut Run Plaza headquarters, where about 3,000 employees now work, the Experimental Station in Alapocas with about 2,500 workers and the Stine Haskell Research Center, near Newark, which has about 600 employees.

DuPont officials declined to say how many jobs would be cut from each facility.

All Delaware workers laid off by DuPont will receive a separation package, career placement services and training allowances based on years of service, company officials said.

"I think DuPont has an obligation to let the public and investors know if Delaware is still in the company's future after 213 years there in the state," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale University. "I still don't see what the vision is."

The impending job cuts are part of DuPont's $700 million global cost savings and restructuring plan announced Dec. 11. That restructuring already has resulted in jobs cuts, consolidated divisions and and halted projects.

In October, DuPont announced it ultimately hopes to eliminate 5,000 positions worldwide, 10 percent of its global workforce, in an effort to slash $1.6 billion from its budget by 2017.