Does the WARN Act Still Matter in the United States? (Layoffs and Closure Transparency)
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act was meant to help workers, but does it still work? Do companies follow the law?
ACCORDING TO this new article from a Canadian law firm, there were many IBM layoffs in Washington (the state) last week, but no notices are shown in the official site, which can leave people with the impression that in the whole of Washington there were only 3 layoffs (in the entire state!) in a one-month period. Samfiru Tumarkin LLP seems to be joking that IBM calls the mass layoffs "workforce rebalancing" (maybe that's what they call it when they replace an American worker with an Indian one paid a vastly smaller salary; this past weekend some discussions brought that up [1, 2, 3, 4]).
The way I see it, based on my gut feeling or basic intuition, WARN Act being quietly and gradually abandoned now that there are so many layoffs and "morale" is impacted. In the past 3 months, on average, US national debt grew 200 billion dollars (per month). That's not even counting personal ("household") and business debt.
Now is the most important time for WARN to... well, act.
Companies say things like, "those other companies aren't reporting, so why should we?"
Will the law actually be enforced? Like with trademarks, when enforcement stops, the whole thing ceases to matter. █