The reality facing laid off workers

Get skilled or join the queue outside the job centre

By BBC News Online's Jorn Madslien

Both the government and Rolls-Royce have vowed to do all they can to help workers who will lose their jobs.

Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt has promised that staff made redundant that they would be given help to retrain for new ones.

I suspect that many, particularly those in their late 40s or early 50s, will never work again

Dr Mark Stuart
Leeds University Business School

And Rolls-Royce's existing network of five job search and resource centres aims to help workers find new post, either within the company or with other firms, a spokesman told BBC News Online.

Rolls-Royce has also employed external consultancy firms to help match workers' skills to jobs elsewhere, or to retrain them for other jobs, he said.

The company has set aside £200m to pay for the rationalisation, a sum which should cover both training, replacement and redeployment costs, as well as severance pay, the spokesman said.

Employability

This message gels well with academia's latest buzzword - "employability" - according to Dr Mark Stuart of Leeds University Business School.

City workers' skills are transferable

"Employees should be trained in such a way that when their job becomes redundant, they should get another job somewhere else, whether for the same company or elsewhere", he told BBC News Online.

Unfortunately, UK companies have a poor history of such training, Dr Stuart said.

"When people are made redundant, that's often the end of them."

International problem

The problem is international, as recognised by Friday's meeting of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) ministers in Kumamoto, Japan.

Requirements for successful pro-active labour market policies:

quality basic education

skills training

skills retraining

lifelong learning

Source: Apec

Apec's fourth human resources development meeting recognised the importance of involving both workers and companies in a push to develop what it called "pro-active labour market policies".

The idea is that governments around the world should facilitate a move towards "multi-skilled" labour forces, manned by workers who will undertake "lifelong learning" and change jobs and careers several times throughout their working life.

City jobs

This idea has taken some hold already.

Take the thousands of finance professionals who have faced the axe in the City.

Not only would many of them have worked for companies that take the idea of lifelong learning seriously, frequently sending staff on course to update their skills and knowledge.

In addition, the skills of City workers are often easily transferable to other areas of finance and business - if for roles which are less well paid.

Higher earning workers will also tend to get larger payoffs, buying them time to find new jobs before their mortgage liabilities catch up with them, explained Dr Stuart.

Companies will often pay for high-flyers to have tailored retraining and career planning advice from companies such as Coutts Consulting.

Advice

Coutts helps redundant staff deal with the shock of being laid off, before helping them back on their feet, the firm's regional director for the South East of England, Paul Jones, told BBC News Online.

Postal workers fighting the cutbacks

Assistance in planning their long-term career and marketing their skills through, for example, speculative approaches to companies is generally offered.

And redundant employees often undertake role playing exercises to prepare them for job interviews.

"Most find jobs through networking, that is through the hidden market [where jobs are not advertised]," Mr Jones said.

Skilled workers

But for skilled workers in industries facing a slump, such techniques offer little comfort.

Typical notice periods:

Managerial: 3 months

Administrative and clerical: 1 month

Manual: 1 week

And less money would be spent on each worker, Mr Jones acknowledged, although he pointed out that where a large number of people was involved, economies of scale would apply.

Manual workers should also expect any pay-offs to be relatively modest.

Rolls-Royce has declined to detail how much laid-off workers would be paid.

But in the case of Consignia, which earlier this month announced that up to 20,000 postal workers would lose their jobs, the severance proposition was of a one-month pay-off for each year worked plus pay during the notice period, Dr Stuart said.

Also, the notice period for factory workers would typically be shorter than for those higher up the corporate ladder.

Managerial jobs often have a three month notice period, while many production workers can be given as little as one week's notice, Dr Stuart explained.

Transferable skills

A long service history with one company may mean staff get blinkered about their career options, said Mr Jones.

Job cuts at Corus in Wales were painful

This is particularly true for specialists who face very little demand for their skills from other companies.

It can be difficult to understand how their skills can be retuned to match other jobs, Coutts' Paul Jones said.

Again, advice from someone with a birds' eye view, that is a consultancy, can be invaluable to help people find out what other companies want and what sort of retraining is available, he added.

Lasting unemployment

When Corus laid off 6,000 steel workers earlier this year, many of its workers felt that they had been assigned to the scrap heap.

More often than not, retraining to work in shops, fast-food restaurants or call centres would not have been an option, explained Dr Stuart.

"It's a challenge to their identity," he said.

Similarly, many of production workers at Rolls-Royce undertook training and apprenticeships in railway yards.

As these closed down, they got jobs at the Rolls-Royce sites.

"The big question is where do these workers go to as the manufacturing base diminishes ever further," said Dr Stuart.

"I suspect that many, particularly those in their late 40s or early 50s, will never work again," he said.

Small firms

Whenever large companies cut thousands of jobs, there will be silent victims outside the factory gates.

Sub-contractors inevitably see demand for their products fall, while hair dressers, restaurants and car dealerships lose out when their customers lose their jobs.

A Rolls-Royce worker digests the news of the lay-offs

When these companies then start sacking people, they will rarely offer severance packages and retraining possibilities.

"Smaller companies just don't have the funding available," said Mr Jones.

The government's Employment Service, Worktrain and other initiatives will bring some relief to these workers.

But compared to workers made redundant by big companies, they are much worse off.