Page 45 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

for each employee which is transferable between jobs and can also be accessed
when an employee leaves the job for any reasons, including voluntary ones.
Others, such as Germany, Finland and Sweden have no statutory rights to
redundancy pay, with reliance instead on the provision of the negotiated social
plan or previously agreed terms and conditions set out on collective agreements.
However, in all Member States, negotiations at the time of the redundancies and
collective agreement provisions can improve any statutory payments and often
do.
There is common recognition across the 11 EU and EEA countries reviewed
that socially responsible practice requires some ‘safety net’ of support for
employees to be made redundant and, more occasionally, at-risk, although there
are great contrasts in defining what that safety net covers. For example, in
addition to redundancy related provision, employment protection or employment
stability legislation exists in a number of Member States (Bulgaria, Ireland,
Slovakia, Finland and Sweden). However, only in the Swedish context do these
seem to have a significant role to play in restructuring management at enterprise
level. Other features of safety nets include:
(a) vocational training support seems to be the most common area of
standardised entitlement but with widely different provisions in terms of when
this is engaged, its scope and focus;
(b) there is a trend reflected in all of these Member States for this codified, and
usually obligatory, notice period to be less intensive. Finland, for example,
has seen the period reduce from 13 to six weeks, and in Sweden the
minimum legally defined period, subject to change by collective agreement,
is just 30 days. In such cases, this would seem to leave little time for any
career guidance related interventions to have an impact on early re-
employment;
(c) other developments in flexicurity are being considered in some of the
reviewed Member States (Finland and Norway) and may emerge as the
recession continues, but any practice here seems to be mainly at enterprise
discretion.
Safety nets also may include some statutory entitlement to retraining of those
affected by redundancy, although this may vary between those seeking
displacement, voluntary redundancy, and those not. In some countries this may
be linked to training subsidies for at-risk employees (Slovakia). Finland’s working
life constitution also sets out provisions for employers to retrain employees at risk
of displacement where redundancy can be prevented by training. Added to this,
safety nets often include a statutory or codified requirement to referral to
employment placements, usually through the public employment services.

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