Socially responsible restructuring in an era of mass redundancy: myth or reality?

Abstract

During the global economic downturn of recent years, there has been rising interest in the anticipation and management of redundancies, and in notions of ‘socially responsible restructuring’, although studies of the effects of layoffs on workers remain relatively scarce. In this paper we address three questions. First, what are the consequences of actions undertaken in the pre-redundancy period on workers? Secondly, how does the concept of socially responsible restructuring translate into concrete actions taken in the pre-redundancy period? Thirdly, what are the critical factors that constrain and mediate socially responsible approaches to restructuring? We address these questions through a detailed case study of restructuring in the steel industry in the UK. We find that actions taken in the pre-redundancy period can have deleterious consequences for workers. We also find considerable gaps between the rhetoric of socially responsible restructuring and the realities of the anticipation and management of redundancies.