Boston Area Hyatts - Was There a WARNing?

by Rob Fitzgerald

I'm not sure I fully understand why Hyatt Hotels let go of their housekeeping for outsourced help.  As a business owner, it is easy for me to see that expenses need to be tightly managed.  However, unless the entire housecleaning staff was incompetent, I can't imagine that tricking staff into training their replacements is going to be a financially sound idea.  As I continue to read about the Hyatt Hotel "switcheroo", I have to ask:

·    Is the laying off 100 or more employees considered a mass layoff? (No pun intended)

·    Does this adhere to the Federal Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act?

If 100 housekeepers are not considered a mass layoff and all the proper federal and state WARN act steps were taken, then these layoffs are just a cold fact of the economy today.  However, if this is considered a mass layoff, someone is in trouble.  It may be Hyatt by not properly notifying the Commonwealth.  Or it may be the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not wanting to deal with any more disappointing economic news. 

What intrigues me the most is that this was not a decision made at the lower management levels.  Most likely, this decision has been discussed and reviewed and analyzed for some time within the Hyatt organization.  And that is where computer forensics comes in.

If it is ultimately decided that something fishy occurred and the Commonwealth or a civil rights group on behalf of the housekeepers brings suit, make sure to ask for the emails, financial projections, and other data that were used to make the decision to terminate the housekeepers.  If it were me, I'd be interested in data created or shared with hotel managers, regional managers, HR, in-house counsel, and other executives.  If the Commonwealth is not involved in bringing the suit, be sure to ask them for electronic communications as well.  The data you want will be both live and deleted, so print out copies won't work.  There seems to be more to this story than meets the eye, so good luck.

BTW: If you are a WARN act expert or have additional information, feel free to share your opinion here.