Just more bribes to buy votes before the election.

From The Hill:

Lockheed Martin said Monday it will not issue employee layoff notices this year, ending an election-year showdown with the Obama administration.

The company said it based its decision on new guidance issued Friday by the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon.

The guidance said the Pentagon did not anticipate killing any contracts on Jan. 2, the day automatic spending cuts are set to begin hitting defense spending. The guidance also said federal government would cover severance costs that are mandated under a federal layoff notices law.

You, the taxpayer, would pay to cover the salary of these laid off workers plus legal fees.

The decision by Lockheed means thousands won’t get layoff notices weeks or days before Election Day, which might have cast a crucial blow against President Obama’s reelection chances. But Republicans are likely to argue last week’s guidance was a politically-motivated effort by the administration to protect Obama.

Bob Stevens, Lockheed’s CEO, created a firestorm in June when he threatened to send out notices of potential layoffs to all 123,000 of his employees on Nov. 2 — four days before the election — due to a law requiring companies to give 60-day notice of mass layoffs.

The Obama administration pushed back in July, telling contractors it was “inappropriate” to issue the notices tied to sequestration, but Lockheed and a handful of other contractors said they were likely to do so anyway.

But the new guidance sent out Friday raised the stakes, telling contractors that the federal government would cover the costs of employee terminations under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act if contracts were cancelled — but only if the contractors did not issue the notices.

The Obama administration promise to pay, but only if contractors ignore the federal law.