Dislocated Workers

About 7,000 plant closures and mass layoffs occurred in 1990 and 1991, leaving more than one million Americans out of work. Although a 1988 law requires certain employers to give their workers and state and local agencies 60 days' notice of impending plant closings or layoffs, about half of all employers in a GAO survey did not give any notice at all and many of those who had provided notice gave less than the required time. The notification provisions of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) were intended to give workers time to adjust and allow states to begin helping workers find new jobs as quickly as possible. As the law is written, however, many major layoffs are not covered and, given the high percentage of closures for which there was no notice or notices were late, the use of the courts as an enforcement mechanism does not appear to be working. GAO suggests that as Congress considers ways to improve the implementation of WARN, the Department of Labor be given responsibility for enforcing the law.