Know ahead of time if you have to follow WARN Act regulations

Q         We’re a privately owned company with fewer than 100 employees. Do we have to follow the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act regulations in the event we decide to conduct a temporary layoff in the near future?

No, your company isn’t required to follow the WARN regulations because, in this instance, you are small enough for the Act not to apply, and temporary layoffs don’t trigger the WARN requirements.

The WARN Act requires employers with 100 or more employees (excluding those who have worked for less than six months or who work fewer than 20 hours a week) to provide 60 days advanced written notice of a plant closing or a mass layoff. This includes a reduction in force that affects 50 or more employees at one employment site. In addition to notifying the employees, an employer covered under the Act must also notify the employees’ representative, state dislocated worker unit, and local government.

The WARN Act isn’t triggered if the separation is temporary and doesn’t last more than six months. If a temporary layoff that affects 50 or more people is extended, the Act may be triggered, and the notice requirement will be backdated to the original date of the mass layoff. If you can show the extension wasn’t reasonably foreseeable at the time of the original layoff, the notice requirements will instead go into effect as of the date you determined an extension was necessary.