Obama administration pushes back at defense layoff threats

“WARN Act notice to employees of Federal contractors,
including in the defense industry, is not required 60 days in advance of
January 2, 2013, and would be inappropriate, given the lack of certainty about
how the budget cuts will be implemented and the possibility that the sequester
will be avoided before January,” the Labor Department said.

{mosads}The new Labor guidance could blunt the
impact of the threats from the defense industry, which has warned that 1
million defense-related jobs could be lost under sequestration.

The sequestration cuts have become an election issue in
congressional and the presidential campaigns, with candidates increasingly
focusing on the jobs angle of the cuts.

House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) responded by
calling the guidance from the Obama administration
“politically-motivated.” 

“Instead of working to bring his party
in the Senate to the negotiating table to resolve sequestration, the
president is focused on preventing advance notice to American workers
that their jobs are at risk and on perpetuating uncertainty,” McKeon
said in a statement. “As it stands, the only certainty we are dealing
with is that dramatic cuts will force huge job losses.”

The statement from McKeon, who blames Obama for sequestration being law, essentially takes the oppososite view of the committee’s ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who says Congress is the reason the measure is on the books.

“This is an important and correct interpretation of the law,” Smith said in a statement. “There is no reason to needlessly alarm hundreds of thousands of workers when there is no way to know what will happen with sequestration.”

Cord Sterling of the Aerospace Industries Association, which
issued the study this month warning of the job losses, said the trade
association’s legal counsel is reviewing and analyzing the new Labor guidance.

Sterling said that AIA was also seeking to “reconcile” the
new guidance with a prior Labor fact sheet on the
WARN Act that says: “The Department of Labor, since it has no administrative or
enforcement responsibility under WARN, cannot provide specific advice or
guidance with respect to individual situations.”

The new guidance, issued by Assistant Labor Secretary
Jane Oates, makes several arguments against issuing the notices that Stevens
had threatened.

The guidance points to the preamble of the WARN Act, which states “it is not appropriate for an employer to provide blanket notice to workers.”

The Labor Department says that because businesses will not
know how the sequestration cuts will affect specific contracts, they would not
yet be able to point to specific plants that would need to be closed, and
generalized notices are not consistent with the WARN Act.

“To give notice to workers who will not suffer an employment
loss both wastes the states’ resources in providing rapid response activities
where none are needed and creates unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety in
workers,” the Labor Department says. “Both of those effects are inconsistent
with the WARN Act’s intent and purpose.”

The guidance says the sequestration cuts would constitute an
“unforeseeable business circumstance,” one of three exceptions to the 60-day
layoff notice rule.

“Although it is currently known that sequestration may
occur, it is also known that efforts are being made to avoid sequestration,”
the guidance states. “Thus, even the occurrence of sequestration is not
necessarily foreseeable.”

This story was updated at 4:51 p.m. and 9:02 p.m.