Making Redundancy Redundant—or How to Save Jobs Without Really Trying

Abstract

“Making redundancy redundant” — this may seem a strange title for a contribution written as high interest rates threaten a further spate of bankruptcies, closures and redundancies. It is a sad commentary on the 1970s, however, that the new decade opens with the issue of redundancy dwarfed in significance by the overall prospect of deepening recession and worsening unemployment. The term “redundancy” first became fashionable as a way of describing labour made superfluous by the technological and market changes sustaining the slow but reasonably steady economic growth of the post‐war years. The term expressed a distinction between job losses and unemployment — between the sack and the dole queue — whose practical and ideological significance was rooted in economic growth and the associated high levels of employment. These conditions no longer pertain. Though the term itself may survive the conditions which gave it currency, it can be expected, as job losses lead more inexorably to the dole queue, to lose its peculiar resonance and acquire a less distinctive — if altogether more menacing — meaning. Redundancy may go out of fashion. It seems unlikely, for example, that the 1980s will produce a crop of redundancy studies comparable to those of the last two decades. At least in this — superficial — sense, redundancy may become redundant as a subject of academic enquiry or public debate.