Republicans: Obama administration hiding big job losses from sequester

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TheHill:

Republicans accused the Obama administration Tuesday of intimidating defense contractors and seeking to hide job losses from pending cuts to the Pentagon’s budget in order to help the president’s reelection campaign.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans pointed to guidance issued Monday by the Department of Labor that said it would be “inappropriate” for defense firms to issue layoff notices to employees before the election due to the pending cuts.

“The president doesn’t want people reading about pink slips in the weeks before his election, so the White House is telling people to keep the effects of these cuts secret — ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he says, ‘keep it a secret’ — until, of course, after the election,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Democrats responded by accusing both Republicans and the defense industry of playing politics themselves with threats of job losses and layoff notices. Republicans have used the layoff threats to bash President Obama for not acting now to prevent the pending cuts to both the Pentagon and non-defense domestic spending.

House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that there was no reason to “needlessly alarm hundreds of thousand of workers” with the notices when sequestration’s outcome remains unknown.

And Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) questioned Republican charges that the Labor Department guidance was politically motivated.

“I don’t think they ought to attribute political motives to every action, and that’s their tendency these days,” Levin told The Hill.

Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens pressed the issue last month when he threatened to issue layoff notices to all 123,000 of his employees on the Friday before the election due to a provision in U.S. labor law requiring large employers to notify employees 60 days in advance of layoffs caused by a foreseeable event.

Trade groups have claimed 1 million defense jobs could be at risk from the pending cuts, which are known as sequestration and were triggered by the failure of a supercommittee of lawmakers to reach a debt deal last year.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Tuesday accused the administration of trying to “intimidate” contractors from properly warning their employees that jobs could be at risk.

“I think it’s really disgusting, quite frankly,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the guidance. “The companies have to comply with the law, and the law of the land is come January, sequestration begins.”

The Labor Department and Democratic congressional aides have argued that the 60-day layoff notices under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act don’t apply because sequestration cuts remain an uncertain event, while the WARN Act refers to specific contract actions and locations.

“Without any detailed information here, it’s crazy to say you need to warn your entire firm that jobs may be at stake in the sequester,” said Gordon Adams, a defense analyst at the Stimson Center. “It’s not consistent with the WARN Act.”