Page 34 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

The Council resolution of 2008 on lifelong learning and guidance (Council of the
EU, 2008) reflected on these effects and suggested that across Europe:
‘Citizens’ lives are increasingly characterised by multiple transitions … from
employment to unemployment, further training or departure from the labour
market’.
Job losses and related changes resulting from industrial restructuring have
also been accelerating in the past 40 years (McKersie and Sengenberger, 1983).
Since then, regional and national responses have tended to be dominated by
what was called the social disruption model and have sought to minimise
disturbance to social and employment structures. Regional and national schemes
to manage restructuring were often supported by European structural and social
funds, with a particular focus on early and short-term transitions.
The track record of such responses has been patchy, with early adjustment
support often providing little evidence of impact on enterprises and individuals
beyond the short term. Over 30 years ago, Birch suggested in an influential study
that such structural change at organisation level could be seen as an organic
process in maturing regional economies. He saw scope for harnessing
adjustment on sound economic, entrepreneurial and social principles, including
integration with other development agendas such as enhanced responsiveness
of publicly-funded education and training to regional skills upgrading. As research
has started to show, such adjustments have much to offer in developing a more
dynamic and responsive approach to the effects of restructuring of enterprises on
local and regional economies.
The public face of restructuring is inherently negative due to immediate job
losses but the consequences of such changes are much more complex. When
viewed across enterprises and across sectors, adjustment does not lead just to
job losses but to change in the evolving nature of work itself and occupations,
and on the wider process through which jobs are developed and engaged in the
labour market (Handy, 1989). Changes linked to restructuring can also be seen
to have positive effects (Gazier, 2005; CIPD, 2003) which are less transparent
than immediate redundancies. Consequently, the European Commission
estimates that restructuring also brings new opportunities ‘as evidenced by the
creation of 12 million new jobs across the EU from 2000 to 2007’, but needs to be
managed carefully to reduce the negative effects of such adaptations. Other
estimates from Cedefop (Cedefop, 2008b and 2010) before the recession had
suggested this expansion would continue, and at a similar level, to at least the
middle of the next decade, and showed (in a 10-year projection from 2006)
generation of over five times more jobs in growth sectors, such as business and
other traded services than in primary industries and manufacturing industries.

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