By Sen. John Kerry
The Fall River Herald News

Yesterday, I introduced the United States Senate to someone whose story needs to be told.

Thirty years ago, Joe Aguiar came to America from Portugal. He was just 17 years old, in search of a brighter future. Joe was able to find work cutting fabric for a curtain manufacturer in Fall River. Three years later, he took a job as a production worker for Quaker Fabric, a company that manufactured fabric for furniture upholstery.

For the next 27 years, Joe worked for Quaker Fabric. He met his first wife there, and he raised a family. Joe was living the American Dream. But one day last summer that all changed. On July 2, Joe went to work and — without any warning — learned that a career of nearly three decades was about to be cut short. The next day, Joe was out of a job.

Joe wasn’t alone. Over the July 4th holiday last year, Quaker Fabric closed its door without a word of warning to its 900 employees. As recently as two years ago, the company employed 2,500 people in and around Fall River — many of whom, like Joe, have been unable to find work in the months and years since the plant’s closure.

When 200 employees were laid off in the summer of 2006, Quaker Fabric blamed “fierce competition from imported Chinese fabrics.” Whatever explanations the company offered for its struggles, it does not excuse Quaker Fabric’s utter failure to inform a loyal workforce of its impending closure.

This responsibility goes beyond moral judgment. Twenty years ago, my friend and senior colleague — Sen. Ted Kennedy, the chairman of the HELP Committee and the Senate’s greatest champion for workers everywhere — helped to write the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The WARN Act requires employers to provide advance notice of 60 days to employees as well as state and local officials in the event of a mass layoff or plant closure. This advance notice is meant to allow workers and their families some transition time to adjust to the loss of employment, to seek and obtain alternative jobs and, if necessary, to seek skills training.

In this economy, finding a good job can be very difficult.Companies must realize this and give the advance notice that is required under law. However, as Joe and his former coworkers are finding out, loopholes within the law and the inability of the federal government to enforce it have allowed for too many companies to sidestep their responsibilities. In 2003, the GAO found that in two-thirds of the layoffs and closures where the WARN Act applied, employers failed to provide notice to employees.That is unacceptable — and it is a violation of the law. Under the law today, it’s clear that too much of the burden falls on employees who must navigate the courts to prove their employers violated the WARN Act. Now, instead of receiving advanced notice and help in transitioning to a new job, Joe is stuck battling the Quaker Fabric Estate in a Delaware court. The case has been tied up since September of last year.

We must fix these loopholes. This is an issue of fundamental fairness for workers.

To begin with, Congress must pass the FOREWARN Act — which I’ve co-sponsored — which would expand the protections of the original WARN Act and would empower the Department of Labor to enforce the law. Under this proposal, Joe would have known a full 90 days prior to the plant’s closing that he would be losing his job. And if the company hadn’t given him fair warning, he could rely on the Department of Labor or the state attorney general to enforce the law.

What else can be done? We can continue the fight to restore fairness to our economy and stand up against corporate abuses. And we can work together in Congress to do what the HELP Committee is doing today: Shine a light on the struggles of patriotic, concerned citizens like Joe Aguiar.

Joe’s story is an emotional, real-life example of why we must immediately reform the WARN Act. We’ve got to make sure that workers like Joe, who give decades of service to a job and an employer, aren’t cast aside without a moment’s notice by the companies they’ve served for decades.

Back when I first became involved in politics as an activist, some people would weigh in against us saying: “My country right or wrong.” Our response was simple: “Yes, my country right or wrong. When right, keep it right and when wrong, make it right.” For America’s workers, it’s time to make our country right again today.

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