Page 18 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

notification periods, training subsidies or other vocational training support, but
these may have limited choice for individuals affected and are not well-placed to
support empowerment, by fostering individuals’ abilities to manage their careers
and work transitions.
The review shows that, across Europe, ‘assisted leaving’ rather than ‘work-
security’ measures seems to be at the heart of how restructuring enterprises
seek to help employees affected by lay-off. Here, direct counselling and guidance
support to employees may be very limited in scale, and tend to be restricted,
where it exists, to short term outplacement for some employees or the required
referral to public employment services of individuals to be made redundant.

Career guidance and socially responsible practice

Understanding the role of career guidance, and its effectiveness, in supporting
social responsible restructuring of enterprises, presents substantial challenges.
There is, as yet, no consensus on what socially responsible practice would
constitute, with little past evidence-based research to help shape understanding
and definitions. At the same time, and although coming from very different
national roots and expectations, local and regional policy measures are
encouraging enterprise-level adjustment to go well beyond compliance with
statutory or codified ‘minimum’ requirements for lay-offs.
Although this remains an often embryonic development, some common
threads emerge for what might constitute socially responsible practice in
enterprise restructuring. This would seem to emphasise a range of instruments
that social partners working together can adopt to aid employees affected by
restructuring. At its most mature, these will combine an early and preventive
focus on ‘work-security’ to minimise and defer ‘permanent’ job losses, with both
internal and external adjustments to support those who voluntarily chose to
leave, or who are not subsequently helped by job protection measures.
Enterprise-level evidence of how these practices work together is limited but
suggests certain characteristics.
Work-security goes beyond remedial financial support to ‘protect’ jobs. Its
emphasis is on prevention of job loss by active measures to support
employability within the same or associated employers, and this requires
imaginative, open and advance ‘early warning’ systems being put in place,
combined with periods of advance notification for job losses rather longer than
those commonplace in Member States. This can offer significant returns for
enterprises keen to retain a highly-developed skills base, their commitment and

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