PLANT CLOSINGS - IS WARN AN EFFECTIVE RESPONSE

Congress has sought to address the issue of transitional economies thr ough the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), whi ch is supposed to provide workers and their communities with advance n otice of a shutdown. With advance notice, workers can then plan for th e closure and avail themselves of the transitional type services avail able under other programs. By this theory, then, WARN might be viewed as a stepping stone in the direction of a more comprehensive employmen t policy. This, however, presupposes that the states administering oth er programs through their Dislocated Worker Units (DWU) are actually r eceiving accurate information closures and compliance with WARN in the ir jurisdiction. In this paper, I examine WARN both in theory and in p ractice. Data drawn from surveys conducted of DWUs suggests that the i nformation we have about closure, its impact, and WARN is uneven, and therefore does not easily lend itself to a clear policy path.