Page 49 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

more intense and diverse than from the transfer agency. Some transfer
companies try to promote rapid transition to a new job by incentives such as
premiums for taking up a new job before the end of the fixed-term contract
(‘sprinter premium’). They may also provide return guarantees, in case the new
employment relationship does not succeed.
Both transfer agencies and transfer companies are also affected by obligatory
referral to PES. In 2007 some 35 000 employees entered short-term transfer
work arrangements, usually in transfer agencies. This rose 3% in the following
year, but has accelerated sharply in the early months of 2009, approximately by
40%.

2.5. Public policy and wider area responses in
restructuring

Adjustment to the job losses caused by enterprise restructuring is not an issue
wholly for company-level practice. Individual enterprises may seek to draw on
external capacities, including those within the public employment services, or
may access funds or funding pathways at national and European-level to aid
individual adjustment processes. These arrangements may be led by public
agencies, such as within rapid-reaction arrangements, to limit social and
economic disruption, or may be proactive where the enterprise may forge the
necessary partnership links and support. At national level, available evidence
suggests that early high profile cases of proactive government regional and
national ad hoc support to strategic job losses in the 1970s and early 1980s have
been followed by more structured approaches. These have emphasised labour
market support and interventions, local collaborations between public and private
entities, and non-standard engagement of public employment services (PES) in
restructuring.
Such responses are important in policy terms. Wider cooperation in enabling
guidance strategies and approaches is a specific priority area for the 2008
guidance Resolution. This recognises findings from previous research by
Cedefop, evaluating implementation of the previous Council Resolution on
guidance (2004) which showed some progress in building capacities nationally
but highlighting ‘more efforts needed to improve quality of guidance services, and
coordinate and build partnerships between existing forms of guidance provision’.
Such partnerships will have a direct bearing on the extent to which enterprises do
not need to act on their own in providing guidance-related support when they are
involved in redundancy situations. The available evidence relating to such

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