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This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing - and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatisation and down-sizing of nationalised steel firms have led to large-scale redundancies. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This Foundation acted like an independent training centre, where displaced workers would spend relatively long training periods (sometimes several years), obtaining personality and orientation training, as well as formal education. The last step of the integrative program was placement assistance as well as assistance creating one's own business. The Foundation was financed by (higher) contributions from unemployment insurance funds, by the previous firms themselves, as well as by a collectively-bargained special tax on the remaining workers in the Steel Firms. Moreover the trainees themselves would have to support the Foundation by depositing their redundancy payments.