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 AOL 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.