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Institute for Workplace Studies----------------- Professor Samuel B. Bacharach
School of Industrial & Labor Relations-------- Director, Institute for Workplace Studies
Cornell University
16 East 34th Street, 4th floor---------------------- Stuart Basefsky
New York, NY 10016 -------------------------------Director, IWS News Bureau
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ILO-International Training Centre (ITC)

 

27 National Seminars on Anticipating and Managing Restructuring - A.R.E.NA.S.

(Service contract VC/ 2008/0667)

EU SYNTHESIS REPORT

27 September 2010

Authors

Ola Bergström is Associate Professor in Business Administration at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Andrea Broughton is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, United Kingdom

Claude Emmanuel Triomphe is the Director of ASTREES, France

http://arenas.itcilo.org/en/eu-synthesis-report/eu-synthesis-report/download

[full-text, 159 pages]

 

See also -- http://arenas.itcilo.org/en/news/eu-synthesis-report-now-available

 

 

PREFACE

This report examines the measures used for anticipating and managing restructuring in the 27

Member States of the European Union at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century.

Restructuring is defined here as any change in the structure of an organisation with an impact on

the employment or working conditions of the workers.

 

The aim of this report is to provide an overview of the measures available to anticipate and

manage restructuring in the 27 EU Member States. We also wish to help policy-makers at the

European, national and regional levels to better understand these measures, and to assist them

in policy formation and the design of more effective legislation. An additional aim of this report is

to support labour market actors, such as trade unions, employers and their organizations, in their

policy-making.

 

The comparative analysis in this report is based on data collected by an international group of

experts in an EU-funded project on Anticipating Restructuring in Enterprises: National Seminars

(ARENAS), coordinated by the International Training Centre of the ILO (ITCILO) in Turin, and on

the minutes of seminars organised in each of the 27 Member States.

The aim of this project was twofold:

 

- to support the sharing of knowledge concerning restructuring; and

- to disseminate the lessons learned on existing and innovative measures being taken in the

 

EU Member States for anticipating and managing restructuring at national, regional, and

local levels, and across specific economic sectors.

 

This report is the first attempt to draw conclusions from this project.

 

CONTENTS

Preface...............................................................................................................5

Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview of Restructuring in the EU ..............................7

1.1 Methodology ................................................................................................9

1.2 The context for restructuring : labour market development ...............................11

1.3 Differences in recent national labour market policy approaches ........................13

1.4 Regulation of restructuring ..........................................................................14

1.5 Regulating redundancies in the context of restructuring ..................................16

1.6 Actors involved in restructuring ....................................................................17

Chapter 2 Anticipating restructuring....................................................................21

2.1 Classification of anticipation measures..........................................................21

2.2 Economic and labour market forecasting measures .........................................22

2.3 Anticipating and supporting transition...........................................................27

2.4 Concluding remarks ....................................................................................37

Chapter 3 Measures to manage restructuring........................................................41

3.1 Measures to avoid redundancies ...................................................................41

3.2 Managing Redundancies .............................................................................49

3.3 Training for transition and reintegration .........................................................57

3.4 Concluding remarks ....................................................................................60

Chapter 4 Dynamics, trends, issues and dilemmas................................................63

4.1 Practices and strategies of the main actors ....................................................63

4.2. Frameworks and measures..........................................................................74

4.3 Concluding remarks : restructuring, the crisis and their three-fold effect ............81

Chapter 5 Conclusions .......................................................................................83

5.1 Anticipating and managing restructuring .......................................................84

5.2 Key Findings and a way forward ...................................................................88

Annexes............................................................................................................91

Annex I – List of national experts ........................................................................91

Annex II – Main measures for anticipating restructuring.........................................93

Annex III – Case studies on anticipation of restructuring: main lessons learnt .........107

Annex IV – Main measures for managing restructuring .........................................111

Annex V – Case studies on management of restructuring: main lessons learnt.........153

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Institute for Workplace Studies 
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