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Is this
outrageous or what!
Investors.com...
Labor
Dept.
Waives 60-Day Notice To Help Obama Win
Politics:
An administration that doesn’t want layoff notices required by law
going out
days before the November election is telling defense contractors they
don’t
have to send them for the cuts required by sequestration.
As the
heads of major defense contractors Lockheed Martin, EADS North America,
Pratt
& Whitney and Williams-Pyro testified recently before the House
Armed
Services Committee, they are bound by law to give employees 60 days’
notice if
their jobs are going to be terminated as a result of sequestration cuts
scheduled for Jan. 2.
Federal law
under the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) Act required
employers
to give workers a minimum of 60 days notice before potential mass
layoffs.
That means
layoff warning notices could go out to hundreds of thousands of workers
just
days before the presidential election, a prospect President Obama and
his
administration do not relish.
Some $500
billion in defense-spending reductions are scheduled to kick in
beginning Jan.
2.
These cuts
come on top of $487 billion in Defense Department cuts recently
approved and
threaten to not only to put our national security in jeopardy but also
gut the
skilled workforce in the aerospace industry.
Robert
Stevens, chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, told lawmakers that his
company
alone is looking at laying off roughly 10,000 employees from its
120,000
workforce.
The layoffs
would be the result of cuts to its largest programs, including the F-35
Joint
Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship.
Subscribe
to the IBD Editorials Podcast To avoid
the electoral consequences of these cuts, the Department of Labor (DOL)
is
informing defense contractors that since sequestration hasn’t actually
happened
yet, and some in Congress are trying to find ways around it, it might
be nice
if they didn’t obey federal law and send out the pink slips just this
once.
Otherwise,
outraged voters might give President Obama a pink slip a few days later.
The DOL has
issued guidelines that acknowledge it is “currently known that
sequestration
may occur, it is also known that efforts are being made to avoid
sequestration.” So, Labor argues, the “WARN Act notice to employees of
Federal
contractors, including in the defense industry, is not required 60 days
in
advance of January 2, 2013, and would be inappropriate, given the lack
of
certainty about how the budget cuts will be implemented and the
possibility
that the sequester will be avoided before January.”
What is
“inappropriate” is the Department of Labor playing election year
political
games to save the boss’ political skin...
Read the
rest of the article at Investors.com
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