Helping The Dislocated Worker

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.

This document records the oral and written testimony given by witnesses at a series of three Congressional hearings conducted in 1993 to review federal retraining programs for dislocated workers. Witnesses included representatives of federal and state agencies, and Private Industry Councils. Witnesses testified about their programs and what has worked and has not worked in their efforts to retrain dislocated workers. The existing programs were described and suggestions made for improvements, including putting programs in place before layoffs, and shortening the timeframe for retraining programs so workers can afford to complete them. However, according to witnesses, whatever successes have occurred have been tempered by the sluggish economy and the reality that most of the new jobs for which workers can be retrained pay substantially less than the jobs they have lost. (KC)