WARN Act riddled with loopholes

In a four-part series, James Drew and Steve Eder of The (Toledo, Ohio) Blade report that a 19-year-old federal law that requires companies to give notice to workers losing their jobs is so full of loopholes and flaws that employers repeatedly skirt it with little or no penalty. A Blade analysis of 226 lawsuits filed in federal courts since 1989 revealed that judges threw out more than half of the cases alleging violations of the Worker Adjustment Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act. In the majority of those decisions, judges cited loopholes in the law, ranging from companies that said they tried their best to give notice to employees to firms that claimed they couldn't predict bad financial times. A day after The Blade's series began, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced a bill to overhaul the law.