However, there's an election coming up just two months before these no-doubter layoffs, and Obama doesn't want layoff warnings going out to thousands and thousands of federal employees days before the presidential election.
Which is exactly what the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice (WARN) Act requires: 60 days' advance warning of mass layoffs.
Curiously (or more tellingly, not curiously), the Department of Labor (DOL), which in the past has said it has no authority to offer opinions on the WARN Act, now proffers the prescription that WARN doesn't apply to sequestration layoffs.
Opining that "even the occurrence of sequestration is not necessarily foreseeable," the DOL — suddenly with the power to interpret WARN — has ruled that:
[Any] 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.Senator John McCain was quick to point out the hypocrisy in the government's stand and of course in the DOL's sudden new powers:
At a time when our economy continues to suffer from staggeringly high unemployment, the Obama administration today took away an important planning tool for Americans who may lose their jobs as a result of the failure of Congress and the White House to address the looming and entirely predictable threat of budget sequestration. Sequestration is currently the law of the land, and our nation’s workers have a right to know how these sequestration cuts which begin in January may impact them.Just another example of Obama's commitment to transparency in governing, right?
