Avoiding WARN Violations

Last week, I did a post about the dangers of violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in light of all the layoffs and business closings occurring these days. I followed-up with a post naming some actual WARN lawsuits that have been filed recently. As the New York Times reports, some large employers (with legal help I’m sure) have figured out a way around WARN.

These employers do the layoffs piecemeal and with no fanfare. As noted in my original post on this subject, a certain number of employees have to be implicated at a single site of employment. A large company has many sites of employment and can keep the number of laid off employees below the number that triggers WARN within the relevant period of time at any of these sites.

Such employers can lay off hundreds or even thousands of employees on a countrywide or worldwide basis, if the layoffs occur in small chunks at different locations. These employers can also do layoffs over a rolling basis on a 12-18 month period of time and avoid WARN’s requirements.

Consequently, a few states have enacted their own WARN laws to cover more layoffs. Some employee advocates think that what larger companies are doing has the effect of avoiding WARN’s two principal goals: “transparency and decency.” WARN’s intent was to give employees to be laid off time to seek new jobs, career counseling and retraining.

An amendment to expand employee rights under WARN, called the FOREWARN Act (see previous post) has been pending a while. It’ll be interesting to see whether it begins to be pushed in light of a growing viewpoint that WARN isn’t working as intended.