The 1989 federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) applies to most businesses with 100 or more employees, requiring that they give sixty days’ advance notice  before closing a facility or conducting a mass layoff. This law is supposed to give workers and their families some transition time to adjust to the loss of employment, including obtaining retraining to make it easier to find a new job. Your union contract probably has provisions that will come into play if there’s a shutdown or layoff. These contractual rights go far beyond what the law provides for employees who don’t have a union. The WARN law won’t stop a company from making business decisions based on its economic condition. But this law is still a valuable one. As a practical matter, the sixty-day “heads up” to a union can provide the time needed to organize community opposition to the company’s decision or to apply some other form of pressure to turn it around.
—Adapted from The Union Member's Complete Guide, by Michael Mauer |
