Page 35 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

Effective and socially responsible adjustment is vital to the health and
effectiveness of the labour market to curtail the scope of job losses and the
longer-term impact on employees and their families across Europe, as the most
immediate casualties of restructuring. The quality of this adjustment (European
Commission, 2008a requires that European citizens are equipped to manage
labour market changes more effectively and have access to information advice
and guidance (IAG) to develop their skills, and to better manage their work
choices and careers. This has been reinforced by the Council Resolution of
November 2008 (Council of the EU, 2008) on guidance and lifelong learning
seeking to stimulate action to build guidance capacity and quality for vocational
guidance which ‘should enable jobseekers to identify the competence required to
move to new jobs where there are skill gaps’.
Job displacement in most situations will go beyond the company announcing
job losses, by affecting suppliers, and have negative multiplier effects more
widely, as consumer spending from those losing jobs falls. While public attention
may focus on the employment and social costs of high profile corporate
downsizing, it is often SMEs as either supply-chain producers or indirect
casualties who bear the brunt of restructuring effects and employment impacts.
The scale of these effects have been recognised in Europe’s own efforts to
support the costs on enterprises of a such adjustments in the European
globalisation fund (EGF), an issue returned to later.
Since 2002, Eurofound’s European restructuring monitor (Eurofound 2007)
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has been monitoring the extent of restructuring in Europe ( ). Despite this
extensive work, in a recent report on restructuring, the European Trade Union
Confederation (ETUC) indicated that empirical knowledge is still limited and
noted that

‘… every year – 10% of all European companies are set up or closed down ... what we
don’t know is: what proportion of these figures might be regarded as being the result of
various forms of restructuring? Which types of jobs in terms of quality, payment and
working conditions are lost and which types are created? What are both the quantitative
and qualitative effects of restructuring on regions and regional development prospects?
What effect does restructuring have on industrial relations and representation of interests’
(ETUC, 2007b, p. 10).

The first sectors in Europe affected by ‘new’ competition were associated with
a radical change in the international division of labour, stemming from new Asian
competitors. In the early 1970s, job losses were associated most strongly with

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( ) The ERM’s focus has been the consequences for employment, collating and analysing
announcements of job creation and job losses across the EU and Norway.

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