Saturday, September 29, 2012

0bama Tells Defense Contractors NOT to Issue Layoff Notices Over Sequestration

Seeing as most of the employees who work for defense contractors hate 0bama's guts, getting the contractors to NOT issue the legally required notices is just more smoke and mirrors from this most transparent administration in history.

Seeing as the notices would be mailed to the employees before the November elections, I guess Chairman MaoBama figures he can pull the wool/blow the smoke, and con the people into not knowing what's going on.

Article below is from The Hill:


The Obama administration issued new guidance intended for defense contractors Friday afternoon, reiterating the administration’s position that the companies should not be issuing layoff notices over sequestration.
The Labor Department issued guidance in July saying it would be “inappropriate” for contractors to issue notices of potential layoffs tied to sequestration cuts. But a few contractors, most notably Lockheed Martin, said they still were considering whether to issue the notices — which would be sent out just days before the November election.
But the Friday guidance from the Office of Management and Budget raised the stakes in the dispute, telling contractors that they would be compensated for legal costs if layoffs occur due to contract cancellations under sequestration — but only if the contractors follow the Labor guidance.
The guidance said that if plant closings or mass layoffs occur under sequestration, then “employee compensation costs for [Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification] WARN act liability as determined by a court” would be paid for covered by the contracting federal agency.

Senate Republicans, who accused the White House of trying to hide job losses after the first guidance, said Friday that the new OMB statement “puts politics ahead of American workers.” “The Obama Administration is cynically trying to skirt the WARN Act to keep the American people in the dark about this looming national security and fiscal crisis,” Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said in a statement. “The president should insist that companies act in accordance with the clearly stated law and move forward with the layoff notices.”
The fight over WARN Act notices began in June when Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens said his company might send the notices to all 123,000 of its employees.
Some companies were hesitant to follow Lockheed, but several others told McCain in letters earlier this month they might send the notices, too, despite the Labor Department guidance.
But the new guidance would appear to address one of the chief concerns from the companies — that they could be liable to compensate employees who were laid off if the companies don’t issue the notices.
The GOP senators complained, however, that this tactic would push the cost of the layoffs onto taxpayers.
A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman told The Hill that the company is still reviewing the documents.

And there's another related article here.

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4 comments:

  1. Teh Won and his minions don't miss a trick, do they? Chicago politics at it's finest.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, pretty disgusting.
    When I worked for Boeing, 99.99% of the people hated that poser. And the people I met from other "defense" contractors hated him just as much. We broke our rear ends building the best stuff we could for our military, and we always felt "close" to them. We weren't the ones in combat, but our stuff was there with them, and we made damn sure it worked when it went out the door.
    It was the same when I worked for Hughes Aircraft on the F-14, Phoenix, and AMRAAM missile programs. One of the department managers summed it up by saying to us one day, "How would YOU like to be the person who had to tell the dead fighter pilots wife and kids that the reason he got blown out of the sky was that the missile YOU worked on malfunctioned because you didn't care enough to do your job properly?".
    That always stayed with me, and really brought it all home.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Major Avionics company, SE division, announced 1200 layoffs coming worldwide, with 350 due to sequestration. Cat's out of that bag.

    The fact that the congress hasn't passed a budget since '09 is going to make the next congress look pretty bad, I'm afraid. Harry Reid had this wonderful idea that they shouldn't pass any budgets because he can be held accountable. Plausible deniability, and all that. The last budgets Obama has proposed have been voted down by like 434 to 1 in the house and don't even make the senate. If we get some sanity and real adults in there, it's going to be ugly.

    Whoever came up with this idea of sequestration, where congress critters have to actually be accountable to stop the cuts, pulled off a politically smart move. Nobody wants to be identified and responsible, so they use "the cuts are automatic" as the excuse for everything. If only someone had a spine, things could be changed. Spines are in real short supply up there.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yep, they are trying to do everything they can to STOP the WARN compliance!

    ReplyDelete

Keep it civil, please....

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