Page 50 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

collaboration is highly variable and needs to be interpreted against the national
contexts, as synthesised above.
Swaim and Tejada (2004) update the extensive range of public employment
policy measures designed to reduce the cost of adjustment, for specific groups of
workers affected by restructuring, including employment measures:
(a) job-search assistance;
(b) training and retraining measures, most of which have preferential access for
specified groups. For example, in France, the ‘retraining leave’ schemes
provide training and job-search allowances for six months to workers who
have been the victims of collective redundancies;
(c) aid for geographical mobility is provided in many countries, including
Germany, France, Austria , Portugal, Finland and Sweden;
(d) enterprise start-up and creation programmes are on offer in many EU
countries. Direct grants, interest-free loans and the provision of guarantees
may be combined in very different ways. Some benefits are linked to the
situation of the person setting up in business, while others are dependent on
the business surviving for a minimum period;
(e) re-employment bonuses intend to persuade people to accept loss of income
as a result of taking a new job that is less well paid than the one they lost, or
that is not their preferred choice.
Gazier (2005) highlights the tendency to group together very different
measures, either for a group of displaced workers from a single company, or on a
regional or national scale. Measures may comprise supplementary job-seeker
allowances, wage subsidies, geographical mobility aid, enterprise creation grants
and training courses specific to the industry or sector.
Company restructuring can affect particular areas or regions, and a range of
research has been undertaken into how local community leaders (including
mayors, county, district and regional officials, trade union officials) facing mass
lay-offs in their localities have responded (Gazier, 2005; Hansen, 2002). Another
very different option highlighted is to encourage workers to take over their own
companies in difficulties. The example given is in Spain, which since the 1970s
has developed cooperative forms of enterprise, enabling workers to buy their
company if it is threatened with closure. This is indicated to have saved over 100
000 jobs (Hansen, 2002, p. 18).
Other community action approaches include instruments enabling workers to
react rapidly to announcements of collective redundancies. Hansen recommends
setting up ad hoc re-employment assistance committees involving workers
representatives, local communities and company management to determine
support services, with the help of experts specialising in restructuring, and to

44