From this morning’s Hartford Courant: State utility regulators on Sept. 24 did something they had never tried before, something that lawyers of long experience said they have rarely, if ever, seen any government agency do. Regulators forbade private companies from laying off some of their own workers.
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At a time when the nation’s president is more aligned with labor unions than any predecessor in at least a generation, and many workers have pent up anger over layoffs and lagging pay, DPUC’s bold move might suggest a controversial new way to restrain unemployment. But labor lawyers and scholars say deep government intervention in the day-to-day operations of private companies is unlikely to become commonplace.
“The corporate community would go ballistic at the mere proposal of widespread use of a mechanism like this to block layoffs,” Lance Compa, a labor lawyer and senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said of the DPUC’s action. “… I don’t think we have the political will to enact a broad policy of blocking private sector layoffs.”
To the extent that other government agencies try to forcibly forestall layoffs by private firms, it is likely to be “intermittent and ad hoc,” he said. The fact that at least one has tried “reflects the extent of the crisis that working people are facing these days.”
