A Guide To Worker Displacement

This guide is an update To The 2001 Guide to worker displacement that was published as a response To The Asian financial crisis. The Guide, drawing on experience primarily in North America and during the transition process in Central and Eastern Europe, explores how enterprises, communities and workers can respond To The financial crisis and how to reduce potential job losses. This includes possible strategies for averting layoffs and promoting business retention by communities, enterprise managements and workers' association. The guide is primarily for use in industrialized and transition countries, and is aimed at policy makers, employers and workers in developing appropriate responses that promote worker retention and employment during the recession.

And synthesis / Peter J. Kuhn -- Displaced workers in the United States and the Netherlands / Joap H. Abbring ... [et al.] -- Worker displacement in Japan and Canada / Masahiro Abe ... [et al.] -- They get knocked down. do they get up again? / Jeff Borland ... [et al.] -- Worker displacement in France and Germany / Stefan Bender ... [et al.] -- Employment protection and the consequences for displaced workers / Karsten Albk, Marc Van Audenrode, and Martin Browning.

The purpose of this paper is to review some international experience in responding to worker retrenchment by adverse economic conditions.

"The transition to market in Slovenia created labor displacements that were on par or greater than that experienced in North America in the 1980s. A simple theoretical model suggests that factors which raise the probability of layoff should also increase the probability of a quit, predictions that are borne out in data. Probability of both layoffs and quits fell with worker tenure, firm profitability and expected severance costs. Individuals facing a higher probability of displacement accepted slower wage growth than otherwise comparable workers. The incentives to avoid displacement were strong -- workers that actually were displaced faced a slow process of transiting out of unemployment with only one-third finding reemployment. Correcting for selection, real wage losses for displaced workers are comparable to those reported for displaced workers in North America"--Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit web site.

Job displacement (involuntary job loss due to firm closure or downsizing) affects many workers over their lifetime. This report looks at the situation of displaced workers in New Zealand.

Examines the major issues in the field today: the theoretical challenges of international protection; lessons learned from the field including Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan; jurisprudential responses from courts; due process issues from Europe, Canada and the United States, and the special needs of migrant workers.