Last year when Congress could once again not manage to pass a budget, they passed a bill that is now referred to as the budget sequester. Basically it said if they could not come to some budget agreement before January 1st 2013, automatic spending cuts would be triggered. That bill among other things would result in cuts as much as 500 billion dollars in defense spending. Now that much decrease in spending would mean massive layoffs for defense contractors and that leads us to, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story”.
According to the “Workers Adjustment and Training Notification Act” of 1988, any company that does business with the federal government must give their employees 60 days’ notice of any potential layoffs.
The WARN Act (as it came to be known) was passed by a veto proof democratic majority and signed into law by President Reagan. Big labor and Democrats hailed the bill as needed federal protection from big business. The idea was that now workers would have some warning that their job might be eliminated in the near future.
But a funny thing happened last week. The Department of Labor issued a directive that this time businesses do not have to follow the law’s procedure when it comes to the upcoming layoffs that might result from the January 1st budget sequester that will slash defense spending and lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs in defense related industry.
For some reason President Obama, and apparently big labor that supports him, does not think those workers need the same protection that they thought was so vital over the last 24 years.
Or maybe - - the prospect of hundreds of thousands of American workers getting pink slips just days before the presidential election warning that they might lose their jobs just days after Christmas justifies the President ignoring the best interest of those very same workers
Some politicians will do anything to get elected.
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