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Our guest commenter on the Madison Arctic Cat plant closing suggests, among other things, Arctic Cat is in violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The Madville Times has not yet hired bar-certified personnel for its Legal Research Department (so don't worry, spammers, no lawsuits... yet). However, interested readers can check out this summary of the WARN Act straight from the U.S. Department of Labor and decide for themselves whether that particular law is relevant.
One perhaps key point: the summary says "employers are covered by WARN if they have 100 or more employees, not counting employees who have worked less than 6 months in the last 12 months and not counting employees who work an average of less than 20 hours a week." The Arctic Cat plant is laying off 89 employees. So when the law refers to employers, does it mean the specific employer at a specific plant, or does it mean the entire corporation? If it's just the local employer, WARN may not apply. If it's Arctic Cat in toto, WARN does apply.
But even if it does, WARN does not appear to require any severance pay. WARN only imposes financial obligations on the employer if the employer fails to give at least 60 days' notice of the layoffs. We may not like the sound of it, but the Anonymous's quote of VP of Manufacturing's reply that "Your 60 day notice is your Severance" may be accurate.
Don't misunderstand the message here: The Madville Times thinks Madison's Arctic Cat workers deserve better than to be laid off for the holidays. Faithful employees deserve more than a heads up to line up another job, especially when that heads up will throw them into a job market that, as Anonymous views it, doesn't offer a lot of options. The workers' plight has us thinking about an idea Thomas Friedman mentions in The World Is Flat: wage insurance (short form: if you lose your job, instead of collecting an unemployment check, you go get a job, any job, and the government pays you some fraction of the difference between your old salary and your new, lower salary for a set period while you get on-the-job training to build your skills and wage-earning power).
But for the moment, it looks like Arctic Cat's Madison employees can't look to their employer or the WARN Act for much help. Severance pay appears only to come from contractual agreements, not from this particular law. Sorry, folks -- we'll keep trying.
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Arctic Cat Employee's spouse says:
ReplyDeleteEither way you look at it, it sucks. Employees are left in a lurch and get robbed of any benefit (like profit sharing) that they would have had if their jobs were still there.
A 60-day notice may be all they were required to do but it's like slap in the face and a knife in the back for those employees that the corporate gurus praised year after year for their hard work and dedication in Madison.
Then again, Arctic Cat employees are sticking it to the plant, too. As they find new jobs, they're gone before their job is done, thus leaving the plant with the challenge of continuing to meet production needs until its scheduled closing.
At the very least, a severance package, awarded to those who stayed until their jobs were done, would have ensured that employees stuck it out until the end and that the company would have had a smooth transition to Thief River Falls. It would have made good business sense, because now they have 89 employees who were burned by a company that makes a product that most will probably never buy again.
Makes you wonder how many people are selling their Arctic Cat snowmobiles, ditching their Arctic Cat clothing, etc.
ReplyDelete