Page 180 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

This typology is presented here tentatively and as a basis for further review. It
aims to provide a framework for understanding different enterprise responses
and how they articulate with broad principles of socially responsible practice, as
well as more specifically what practices may be involved in guidance-related
support. In particular, the study research cautions about how to apply the
gathered evidence to wider circumstances and emerging policy issues. The
transferability of these restructuring approaches to often very different national
and company circumstances remains unclear.
The lack of useful impact evidence is well known to those seeking to
demonstrate the efficacy of career guidance interventions more generally.
However, the lack of wider impact evidence seems more acute when looking at
socially responsible practices in enterprise restructuring, especially for the
contribution made by different career guidance activities supporting displaced
workers. This stems partly from the general lack of tracking of displaced workers
as they move from the lost job into the wider labour market. In most situations,
this lack of impact evidence reflects the often very short time span that such
support was available for many employees. The notable exception seems to be
in Sweden where ‘flexicurity’ arrangements and empirical evidence on the
effectiveness of these processes is relatively rich, including for the role of the job
security councils. There is also some evidence of unanticipated knock-on impacts
for enterprises such as the confidence given by preplanned arrangements for the
‘surviving’ workforce.
Any impact evidence collated from rapid reaction programmes seems to be
related to very short term outcomes for displaced workers, often at the end of a
defined short period of support such as guidance or self-employment workshops.
The risk of deadweight effects also seem to be overlooked in favour of more
immediate measures and outputs. Opportunities for establishing impact
assessment into programme funding or contractor delivery and monitoring seem
to have been neglected. A similar concern might be applied to monitoring activity
within PES. Here, there is little evidence from this review that clients coming from
local redundancies are classified separately and consequently monitoring has not
been tapped to isolate the effects of PES support in restructuring situations.
The impact evidence provides little information about the relative effectiveness of
different measures, applied in different enterprise, sectoral and national contexts,
and, as far as this review can demonstrate, none at all at how this affects
enduring employability among displaced workers. In this context it would be
premature to make robust judgements about the effectiveness of current
practices. This presents policy-makers, including national and European social
partners with a dilemma: the absence of evidence on effectiveness may be

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