Analysis of the WARN Act

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act is an important piece of legislation for both businesses and employees first enacted in 1988. Essentially, it requires companies with more than 100 full-time employees who are covered under the act to provide at least 60 days’ notice before laying an employee off due to the closing of a branch or mass layoff (Levine, 2). In the given example, a system analyst created a computer application that essentially worked too well and caused a large number of production workers to become obsolete.

Now, the legality of this situation of the WARN act is something of a murky issue. However, the main aspect of the WARN act is to provide notice in advance of mass layoffs, not to prevent these layoffs altogether, or even provide for worker's benefits protection. In order to determine the legality, or lack thereof, of the system analyst's actions, it would be necessary to examine the company itself. If the company had more than 100 full-time workers who had been with the company for more than six months, and planned on laying off more than fifty of them, then the company would be required to give advance notice of 60 days before enacting the analyst's application (Collins, 7). It is unlikely that the company would require layoffs of such a magnitude, so the company probably need not worry about legal ramifications. However, if the company met these criteria and simply laid off the workers right then and there, with little or no advance notice, the employees would surely notify the proper authorities, and the business would be penalized by the government. However, there are ways around WARN, such as by offering the employees a transfer to another place of employment, or some other form of post-layoff compensation (ETA, 11-12). This does not account for the ethical dilemma and implications of laying off so many employees due to cold calculation on one analyst's part, of course, but business is business.

This brings up the action of the system analyst. While nothing he did was illegal (in fact, many businesses would praise him for making the production process more efficient by cutting the human factor), it was still, at best, extremely unethical. All businesses have a certain degree of loyalty that they owe their employees, even those who have not been with them for very long, and simply designing a program that instantly makes some of them obsolete violates that loyalty, and, even if it is not illegal, will cause the employees who were laid off to take some sort of action against the company. In large numbers, these disgruntled employees could be very formidable. The best solution for the company is to give the employees the required advance notice under the WARN act before laying them off, in order to ensure the company will have solid legal footing if the employees attempt legal retaliation.

Thus, although the company would probably not be violating any legal bounds, since WARN only applies to a large number of layoffs, the best course of action is nevertheless to provide these employees with the WARN-required 60-day notice period in order to ensure the employees will not retaliate, as well as that the employees themselves will have time to find another job. This way, the company is satisfying both the legal and ethical requirements for the action, while still enjoying the reduced cost that replacing employees always brings. A business cannot simply look strictly at the bottom line every time. They must consider how their actions will affect those working for them, and obeying the standards set by the WARN act, even if the employees don't qualify for it, satisfies that consideration.

Works Cited

Collins, Benjamin. "Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act" (2012). 7.Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42693.pdf

Employment and Training Administration "WARN: Employer's Guide to Advance Notice of closings and Layoffs" (2003):10-15. Retrieved from http://www.doleta.gov/layoff/pdf/employerwarn09_2003.pdf

Levine, Linda. "The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN)." FederalPublications (2007): 485.