Redundancy, Readjustment, and Employability: What Can We Learn from the 2000 Harland & Wolff Redundancy?

Abstract

Large-scale redundancies have been a common feature of the UK industrial landscape in recent years and a changing labour market and institutional context supports the need for ongoing research into this important area. In this paper the authors examine the postredundancy experience of workers who were made redundant from Harland & Wolff in Belfast in 2000 to identify the factors that affected the employability of those workers and to consider some aspects of state intervention. These workers might be regarded as being potentially disadvantaged with high risks of long-term unemployment and so provide a stiff test for policies for successful postredundancy transitions into the new economy with its demands for employability and flexibility. Employability is usually associated with supply-side measures, but the role of labour demand also needs to be explored, and the adjustment process is thus considered against the background of overall labour-market change that has occurred in Northern Ireland in recent years. The authors suggest that state intervention through the provision of job-related training can be a successful response to redundancy but that general skills training is questionable because of low uptake and perceptions of irrelevance. Job-specific training was not sufficient on its own to explain the relatively high rates of reemployment in this case. The presence of a group of engineering employers provided both the conditions for job-related training and then the vacancies for the redundant workers to fill. In debates about employability it is important that the demand-side of the labour market should receive sufficient attention. The authors also suggest that there are wider merits in taking a geographical approach to labour-market policy even if only restricted to the supply side. They suggest that employability should be developed in ways specific to local conditions and groups of workers. The differences in the characteristics of the workers who followed different postredundancy paths led to the conclusion that interventions could be precisely targeted to clearly defined groups of workers.