Senate to Decide if Workers Get Advance Notice of Plant Closings

The Senate, split over a highly charged issue dividing the business-labor coalition supporting trade legislation, bogged down all day Wednesday before finally agreeing to a showdown this morning on a proposal that would require workers to receive advance notice of major plant closings.

A close vote is expected on a Republican proposal to eliminate the labor-sponsored measure from the trade bill, but Democrats appeared to have enough votes to retain the provision.

Republicans called the proposal a “killer amendment” that would guarantee President Reagan’s veto of any bill reaching his desk with the plant-closing provision.

The proposal, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, would require any firm employing more than 100 workers at a plant to provide at least 60 days’ notice before shutting down the facility or imposing mass layoffs.

Amendment Watered Down

The amendment is considerably watered down from the committee-approved plan that would have placed greater burdens on plant closings.

In a bid to extract the final votes necessary to assure majority support for the measure, supporters agreed late Tuesday night to shorten the advance notice requirement from 90 days to 60. Earlier, they had softened other aspects of the proposal, lifting the threshold for advance notice from plants employing more than 50 workers to those with at least 100 and eliminating a provision that would have required firms to disclose financial information to workers seeking to prevent the shutdown.

Despite the compromises, which appeared to have won over several wavering lawmakers, Republicans threatened to fight a rear-guard action that is likely to delay Senate approval of the trade bill until next week.

“This is a gut issue,” said Sen. Steve Symms (R-Ida.), a staunch opponent of the measure.

Opponents of the measure, led by Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.), charge that the plan is the first step toward federal control over plant closings and would threaten growth and reduce jobs by interfering with necessary adjustments to economic change.

Cushioning the Blow

Supporters of the provision insist it is necessary to cushion the blow for workers and communities affected by a major shutdown by providing enough advance notice to smooth the transition to new jobs.

“Times have changed for American workers. The worker who will stay with one employer for 30 years is fast becoming more the exception than the rule,” Kennedy said. Advance notification “ensures that large numbers of workers will not be displaced without warning and without planning.”

But Quayle argued that the provision, while relatively mild compared with much stiffer plant closing requirements in most other industrial nations, would “begin a very intrusive interference into the private sector” by the federal government and the judiciary. The proposal, he said, would “take away much of the flexibility that our business has enjoyed as a comparative advantage.”

The bid to require advance notice of plant closings, at the top of labor’s political agenda for several years, prompted business lobbyists to launch an all-out effort to kill the provision and forced Metzenbaum to repeatedly water down his proposal to gain support.