Feds fail workers hurt by outsourcing

[OhioChick]

Friday, December 29, 2006

Critics call for massive overhaul of program designed to help employees displaced by globalization.

The machine-tool designers at Tesco Technologies' Auburn Hills plant had long suspected that the Indian engineers whom they had helped train would one day take their jobs. The layoff notices, in the summer of 2004, were no surprise.

But the Tesco engineers had not imagined that they would face a second opponent: the U.S. Department of Labor. When they applied for help from a federal program designed to help those unemployed because of international trade, the department first delayed, then denied their application.

More than two years later, they're still waiting for benefits, despite a federal judge's ruling that the labor department officials essentially invented their reason for denying the workers' application.

"I think their process (is) no matter what, they're going to deny it," said Gary Mosey, 50, of Oxford Township, who filed the original application and has been fighting since. "It's so late now, several of these people have either found another way to hang on, or they went down already."

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061229/BIZ02/612290367