Keep Calm and Carry On

Defense industry firms are turning up the heat surrounding the sequestration debate, raising threats that federal law will require them to send off hundreds of thousands of lay-off notices just before the upcoming election. A recent article by Bloomberg puts these claims into a clearer context—a context that looks a lot like our own Gordon Adams has described. 

To employment-law attorney Margaret Keane, giving mass dismissal warnings in such uncertain conditions looks more like a lobbying tactic by corporations trying to ward off the cuts than an effort to follow the letter of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

A point echoed in the article by Byron Callan noted:

“That’s more a scare tactic than something that aligns with the underlying reality of how sequestration works,” Callan said.

Borrowing from a historically popular saying of the UK, we must be mindful to keep calm and carry on without focusing too much on the smoke being blown around sequestration.