In 2007, Barack Obama had some clear opinions on The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), which requires employers with 100 workers or more to give 60 days’ notice of a plant closing or mass layoffs, and Obama actually wanted to beef up the law and give it "teeth."
Obama was also a proponent to the Forewarn Act, which would have added to the regulations by requiring 90 days notice of layoffs and expanding the number of companies under federal jurisdiction, which did not get passed.
Key quotes from Obama in 2007:
• “The least employers can do when they’re anticipating layoffs is to let workers know they’re going to be out of a job and a paycheck with enough time to plan for their future,” Mr. Obama said in a news release on July 17, 2007, while campaigning for president.
• “For too long, employers have failed to notify workers that they’re about to lose their jobs due to mass layoffs or plant closings even though notice is required by the WARN Act,” Mr. Obama said in that news release on July 17, 2007.
• That same month, Mr. Obama also said, “We must act at the federal level to close the loophole that allows employers to disregard the WARN Act without penalty. We must give the WARN Act teeth, to ensure that workers are not left in the lurch without a job or a paycheck.”
Obama Changes His Stance
It is now 2012 and Barack Obama is trying to get reelected and he has flip-flopped on his 2007 position and sees no reason why employers should notify their employees about the upcoming layoffs due to looming budget cuts that are slated to begin Jan. 2, 2013, because those notices would have to go out right before the presidential election and could potentially cost him a large amount of votes.
Via Washington Times:
The Obama administration said Monday in guidance from the Labor Department that federal contractors don’t need to warn their employees that they could lose their jobs because of the looming budget cuts that are slated to begin Jan. 2. The agency said it would be “inappropriate” for employers to send such warnings because the $110 billion in cuts are still speculative. Defense programs would be the target of about half of the cuts.
The Labor Department’s letter came after a Pentagon official said Defense Department contractors could be sending layoff notices days before the Nov. 6 presidential election. Some industry groups predict the budget cuts could cause as many as 1 million workers in the U.S. to lose their jobs. Lockheed Martin, for example, has told Congress it might be forced to lay off 10,000 of its 120,000 employees.
The White House is worried that thousands of those jobs would be lost in election battleground states such as Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.
On July 18, 2012, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke on the Senate floor and warned everyone that Obama had been leaning on industry to prevent those layoff notices.
“I have every reason to believe, because I’ve heard from people in industry, that the President of the United States is trying to get them to avoid sending pink slips out until after the November 7 election,” said Inhofe. “I would remind him that we have something called the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, the WARN Act. It requires these companies to give 60 days’ notice of pending layoffs.
“Since Sequestration will take place on January 2nd, these workers must be notified of their pink slip by November 2nd. This is what I’d like to remind those companies: they don’t have to wait. If they want to notify workers today, they can do that. I think it is imperative that the workers who are going to be laid off work as a result of the Obama Sequestration be notified in advance of the November election. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens.”
This follows a pattern of Barack Obama's administration attempting to prevent the public from the knowing of the ramifications of his policies until after the 2012 presidential election.
From a previous Wake up America piece:
Recently it was reported that Obama's massive Medicare cuts to the elderly will not be seen before November 2012, even though they were originally scheduled to hit before that time, because the Obama administration, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), has delayed those cuts so they do not hit until after the presidential election in 2012.
[...]
Looking at the 20 taxes written into Obamacare, many of them are not scheduled to be implemented until 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2018, all after the 2012 election.
Is there any low this man will not sink to in order to get reelected.
Yes, that was rhetorical.
(Obama Two-Face image by The Looking Spoon, special edition, "Liberal Supervillains" )
(Effective date for new cuts changed from 2012 to 2013 thanks brat!!!)