AFL-CIO pushes stronger legislation on plant closing notification

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_3665

Wednesday 28th May 2008 07:04 AM

By Mark Gruenberg
26 May 2008

WASHINGTON - Only one-third of the plants covered by the nation's 20-year-old plant-closing "Warn Act," obey that law, and workers are hurt nationwide as a result, the AFL-CIO says.
The law orders medium-sized and large companies to tell their workers 60 days before a shutdown, federation Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka told senators on May 20. But it's widely flouted and it covers only a quarter of U.S. firms, he added.

The surprising data were the top topic of discussion at a Senate Labor Committee hearing, called to review the law's performance and see if it needs improvement. Trumka emphatically said it did. So did all other witnesses, except for the GOP's management-side labor lawyer.

"The Warn Act was built out of the cataclysmic loss of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s," Trumka said. "Since then, the wave of plant closings and off-shoring buffeting our economy has only gotten worse…Since 2000, more than 40,000 manufacturing establishments have closed their doors and now the plague of mass layoff has spread to the service sector," he told Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who has introduced legislation to strengthen the law.

"Layoffs continue at a pace of 1.5 million impacted workers every year and almost half a million workers have been idled by mass layoffs in the first three months" of this year, Trumka said. The Warn Act covers mass layoffs as well as plant closings.

But the Warn Act has big problems and "hasn't lived up to the hopes" unions had when they pushed it through 20 years ago, Trumka said:

• It covers too few workplaces--only those with at least 100 workers.
• Only one-third of the employers it covers obey it when the time comes.
• If the employer gets caught flouting it, the only fine is back pay and benefits the workers are owed. There have been only 226 cases of employer violations in 20 years, and half were thrown out because of the law's exceptions, Trumka noted.
• Workers get only 60 days notice of a plant closing, and the notice is required if at least 50 workers are laid off by the closing or mass layoffs of shifts of workers.
• It lacks aid to workers facing the plant closing and needing to train for and find other jobs.

FULL story at link.