Aug 2, 2012 No Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Excerpted from BIG GOVERNMENT: Obama’s Labor Department is doing its best to circumvent a law that Obama himself supported in order to avoid bad economic headlines before election day.
As I documented here at Breitbart News on Tuesday, DOL is trying to pressure defense contractors to hold off on announcing layoffs made necessary by impending Defense sequestration cuts, despite a law that requires them to give their employees 60 days notice before those layoffs take place.
Paul Conway, a former top DOL official, told me that the move reeks of politicization. The move “comes across as very crass,” Conway said, adding that the administration doesn’t want to “further a bad news story less than 100 days from an election.”
The law in question, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, is quite clear on contractors’ responsibilities to their employees, but DOL is trying to use “the weight of the cabinet officer [Labor Secretary Hilda Solis] and the weight of the department,” in Conway’s words, to bully contractors into silence.
Not only is the law clear, it’s one that Obama himself supported during his time in the Senate. “For too long,” he stated in a 2007 press release, “employers have failed to notify workers that they’re about to lose their jobs due to mass layoffs or plant closings even though notice is required by the WARN Act.”
“The least employers can do when they’re anticipating layoffs,” Obama added, “is to let workers know they’re going to be out of a job and a pay check with enough time to plan for their future.”
