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This Insights article examines the degree to which workers who lost their job in 2009 started a business, changed regions, went back to school or began a registered apprenticeship in 2010, the year following job loss. The analysis combines the 2001 Census of Population with Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Worker File and Registered Apprenticeship Information System. The study shows that about one in six displaced workers used at least one of the aforementioned adjustment strategies in 2010. Displaced workers who did not find a new paid job in 2010 were more likely to do so than their counterparts who found a new paid job that year. Yet three-quarters of the displaced workers who had no paid job in 2010 did not use any of the four strategies defined above.

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American employment policy for displaced workers started in the Great Depression with programs for the employment service, unemployment insurance, work experience, and direct job creation. Assistance for workers displaced by foreign competition emerged in the 1960s along with formalized programs for occupational job skill training. The policy focus on displaced workers was sharpened in the 1980s through the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and the Economic Dislocation and Worker Adjustment Assistance Act. Field experiments on services to dislocated workers led to Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services systems in all states, and federal rules adopted as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement Act permitted [unemployment insurance] UI benefit receipt while starting self-employment. Evaluation evidence suggests there should be continuous connection of unemployment compensation recipients to reemployment services, skill training closely connected to employer requirements, earnings supplements to ease transitions to different jobs, efforts to maintain and strengthen employer-employee relationships, information channels to employees and communities about impending employment disruptions, and targeting of services to improve returns on public investments. While no silver bullet emerges to solve worker displacement, many different programs addressing a variety of needs can improve labor market outcomes after permanent job loss.

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As the United States economy moves away from manufacturing, members of this workforce are facing an uncertain future. In this study, an interpretive methodological framework is used to explore women's experiences with textile manufacturing job loss, and subsequent retraining at a local community college. Narratives of four displaced workers and one community college administrator are used to illustrate the dimensions of participant experiences with the transition from being a full-time manufacturing employee to becoming a full-time student. Consideration of what their experiences mean for the role of the community college in the changing job economy provides a framework for interpretation.

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Automation is changing the way we work. While new innovations are essential to improve productivity, often the incorporation of new tech into workplaces pushes Australians out of work - sometimes permanently. This report explores how overdue reforms to Australia's redundancy framework can provide a smoother path to re-employment for Australians who lose work due to technological disruption.

Part 1 of this report begins by briefly exploring the changing nature of the Australian economy, and the impact automation and technological disruption is having on work. It notes how the labour-share of income has been declining in recent years, in large part due to technological disruption which have led to real labour costs for the private sector declining, despite profits increasing. Part 2 examines the nature of redundancy and retrenchment in Australia. Part 3 proposes actionable reforms aimed at tailoring Australia's redundancy framework to Australia's modern, dynamic, innovative economy. These proposals focus on harmonising the definitions of redundancy in the Fair Work Act, formalising the retraining and re-deployment obligations of larger employers that engage in labour-cost minimisation through automation, giving workers more time to consider or contest the validity of their dismissal, expanding access to redundancy and raising redundancy payments for workers who have been in a job for less than five years, and exploring ways to, in the long term, use a portion of profitability associated with automation for re-skilling and re-employing Australian workers.

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It is too early to know how many Canadian workers will lose their job, i.e. will be permanently laid-off, as a result of the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic and what will happen to them financially after job loss. Yet a number of stylized facts emerge from the past. While these facts do not necessarily allow accurate predictions of the impact of the pandemic on job displacement, they provide a long-term perspective from which forthcoming labour market developments can be assessed. The goal of this article is to highlight these facts.

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This study documents the use of four adjustment strategies by Canadian workers permanently laid off in 2009 - in the middle of the last recession: moving to another region, enrolling in post-secondary education, signing up for a registered apprenticeship and becoming self-employed. The authors examine whether the adoption of strategies varied according to workers' characteristics and their employment status a year after job loss, and to what extent it differed in the short and long terms. Looking at adjustment patterns in the first and fifth years after job loss, the authors find that, overall, only a minority of displaced workers - at most one in five - adopted at least one of these strategies. The use of adjustment strategies varied considerably depending on gender, age, education and other characteristics.

Documenting and quantifying the adoption of various adjustment strategies is a first step in improving understanding of workers' behaviour after job loss. Each strategy has pros and cons to be considered. And identifying the predominant strategies can shed light on the wide array of incentives and barriers people face when responding to job loss, especially when employment options are scarce. In the postpandemic world, the findings of this study will be especially relevant for informing the development of policies to support displaced workers.

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Job displacement (involuntary job loss due to firm closure or downsizing) affects many workers over the course of their working lives. Displaced workers may face long periods of unemployment and, even when they find new jobs, tend to be paid less and have fewer benefits than in the jobs they held prior to displacement. Helping displaced workers get back into good jobs quickly should be a key goal of labour market policy. This report is the second in a series of reports looking at how this challenge is being tackled in a number of OECD countries. It shows that Japanese employers and the government go to considerable lengths to avoid the displacement of regular workers while also providing considerable income and re-employment support to many of the workers whose jobs cannot be preserved. Challenges for labour market programmes include expanding labour market mobility between regular jobs, improving co-ordination between private and public re-employment assistance for displaced workers, and avoiding that job displacement pushes older workers to the margins of the labour market.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less

Job displacement (involuntary job loss due to firm closure or downsizing) affects many workers over their lifetime. Displaced workers may face long periods of unemployment and, even when they find new jobs, tend to be paid less and have fewer benefits than in their prior jobs. Helping them get back into good jobs quickly should be a key goal of labour market policy. This report is part of a series of reports looking at how this challenge is being tackled in a number of OECD countries. It shows that in New Zealand most displaced workers find a new job again, largely due to a strong economy and a highly flexible labour market. But many of them face large losses in terms of job quality and especially wages. And displaced workers facing difficulties in New Zealand are largely left on their own to find a new job, as the means-tested public benefit system only provides for people in need and employment services concentrate on helping people off benefit with limited focus on those not receiving a benefit.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner.

Nine countries are participating in the review: Australia; Canada; Denmark; Finland; Japan; Korea; New Zealand; Sweden; and USA. The chapters are as follows: Job displacement in New Zealand and its consequences; Easing the impact of economic restructuring on displaced workers in New Zealand; Re-employment support for displaced workers in New Zealand who struggle to find a new job. Show less

Job loss leads to persistent adverse labor market outcomes, but assessments of gender differences in labor market recovery are lacking. We utilize plant closures in Denmark to estimate gender gaps in labor market outcomes and document that women face an increased risk of unemployment and lose a larger share of their earnings in the two years following job displacement.

The majority of the gender gap in unemployment remains after accounting for observable differences in human capital across men and women. In a standard decomposition framework, we document that child care imposes an important barrier to women's labor market recovery regardless of individual characteristics.

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Japan's coal industry met its demise following a number of stages of restructuring under policies to change the structure of the energy industry. More than 200,000 coal mine workers were displaced from 1955 onward. The task of providing measures for displaced workers was recognized as an issue to be addressed at national level and such initiatives were considered to have considerable significance for the interests of society as a whole. This led to the development of substantial support systems of the kind not seen in other industries, and comprehensive measures were adopted to cover not only re-employment, but also relocation, housing, and vocational training.

In the light of the processes of restructuring in the coal industry noted above, this paper outlines how displaced coal mine workers found careers in other businesses and industries, and how the employment measures and support which were provided assisted them in doing so. This reveals the following two points. Firstly, although the Unemployment Insurance System for Displaced Miners (Black Notebook System) was developed to support displaced coal mine workers, fundamental issues were left unresolved, and as a result, support for displaced workers relied on the strength of individual companies and regional communities. Secondly, personal support founded on the unique culture of coal mining, in particular the sense of solidarity among workers, has compensated for the insufficiencies of the formal support systems. This support included not only financial assistance, but also individual support, such as individual counselling and employment assistance provided by former coal mine employees acting as counselors. The labor unions played a central role in developing these measures.

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