The use of redundancy as a workforce adjustment strategy during the recession in Britain

Event Date: 11 October 2017

Speaker: John Sutherland, Honorary Research Fellow, Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER)

Time: 4-5pm

Location: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW5.06a

Human Resource Management Research Seminar Series:

This paper uses a micro data set from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study to examine the workforce adjustment strategies workplaces used in response to the Great Recession, focussing in particular on redundancy. 17.25 per cent of workplaces implemented redundancy programmes of some sort i.e. ‘voluntary’ and/or ‘compulsory’. In terms of the predicted probabilities calculated, redundancy was more important if the workplace was affected ‘a lot’ by the recession. Nonetheless, redundancy was not as important as some other workforce adjustment strategies notably freezing wages, freezing recruitment to fill vacancies and changing the organisation of work.

About the speaker:

John has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER) since 2012. Between 2007 and 2012, he was an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy for Regions (CPPR) at the University of Glasgow. He has published a range of work examining employment status, skill, training and attitudes to work focusing particularly on recent UK national survey datasets.

Published: 3 October 2017