Labor & Employment Law

Better Access to WARN Act Information Needed for Workers, Communities

By Mike Hall

Last year, more than 2.8 million workers were victims of mass layoffs or plant closings that should have fallen under the 1988 WARN Act, which requires employers to give workers and communities advance notice before shutting down. But, as a new AFL-CIO report reveals, the plant closing ?has proven severely flawed.?

Numerous reports have concluded that most layoffs are not subject to WARN Act requirements; few employers act in compliance with the law; and penalties for noncompliance are so lax that they do not act as deterrents.

The AFL-CIO report, “The Public Availability of WARN Notices: Lack of Accessibility and Disclosure Calls for Reform,” examines the difficulty in obtaining WARN notice information that can be vital in planning for the economic and jobs impact of a mass layoff or plant closure.

With access to comprehensive and easy-to-use data bases of past layoffs and plant closures, organizations working to increase employment in states can look for trends in past economic dislocations as they chart their paths forward.

We presented the report to the U.S. Department of Labor?s Employment and Training Administration today.

Essentially, the WARN Act requires employers with more than 100 full-time workers to provide 60 days advance notice of a plant closing to local and state officials, the workers and their union.

Community leaders and workers who are given this advance notice can then work to mitigate the effects of the job losses by offering retraining programs, providing social services and working to avoid layoffs altogether.

But nearly each state has its own set of rules and regulations on handling WARN notices, which the report describes as a:

flawed jumble of websites, offices, and email accounts, which organizations and individuals must keep track of to obtain information on economic dislocations across the country.

Most states have Rapid Response Teams to assist employers, workers and communities during a mass layoff or plant closing. But the report  found that in many cases when those coordinators tried to push for easier and more WARN notice public disclosure, the coordinators reported they had:

encountered pressure from businesses and politicians when they tried to push for disclosure on websites.

The report examines states with difficult or flawed disclosure rules and states with best practices and makes a series of recommendations to the Labor Department, including:

• Issuing a regulation, training and employment notice or guidance letter requiring states to forward any WARN notices received to the Department of Labor for inclusion in a centralized, publicly accessible database.
• Developing a standardized format for WARN notices and conducting an educational campaign to encourage adoption of the format in the submission of notices.
• Adopting the best practices described within this report for the handling of WARN information within that centralized database.
• Connecting WARN data to other site-specific employment information using unique, site-specific nine-digit identification numbers.

Click here for a copy of the full report.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 29, 2010 (boomark / email).