FRIENDLY’S Fires 1260 Employees With No Warning

The bankrupt Friendly’s Ice Cream Corp. abruptly, and with no warning, laid off 1,260 employees Tuesday night.

That’s not a very Friendly thing to do, is it? Some companies use the economy and bankruptcy to justify all kinds of crappy behavior, don’t they?

According to a Fox Business report:

“Friendly’s Ice Cream Corp. laid off 1,260 employees with almost no notice on Tuesday night. And there’s little that employees can do about it.

“Though workers have been mostly mute, one Dedham, Mass., waitress who had been with Friendly’s for 27 years spoke to Dedham Patch about her restaurant’s closing. “This is my heart,” Helen Smolak said of her job. “Nobody knows more about Friendly’s than I do.”

“Federal law does prohibit companies from laying off workers en masse, through something called the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) Act, but only if those workers — a minimum of 50 — are located on one specific site. The rationale: Communities aren’t devastated when a franchise closes in same way that they are when a large factory does, like the recently bankrupt Solyndra plant in Silicon Valley.

“Yet more states are looking to close this loophole to cover outfits like Friendly’s that employee large numbers of people spread across multiple workplaces.

“Friendly’s filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday and shuttered 63 restaurants, effective immediately. The layoffs represented more than more than 12% of the company’s 10,300 person workforce, a Friendly’s spokesman told DailyFinance….”

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