Job Insecurity and Labour Market Lemons: The (Mis)Management of Redundancy in Steel Making,Coal Mining and Port Transport

Redundancy provisions in Britain have failed to promote organizational regeneration or labour mobility from declining to expanding firms/industries. On the contrary, as human resources are wantonly discarded through the (mis)management of redundancy, job security and X-efficiency in the internal labour market has been severely eroded. In external labour markets, many redundant workers, the so-called `lemons' of the labour market, are consigned to long-term unemployment because employers are wary of hiring a worker that another firm does not want. These deleterious outcomes are elaborated through detailed case studies from steel-making, coal-mining and port transport, where mass redundancy has proved instrumental in the process of industrial restructuring. In order to re-establish trust and security in the internal labour market, alternative methods of managing changing labour market requirements, based on reconversion rather than redundancy, are considered in the concluding section.