ABSTRACT
In 1965 the British Redundancy Payments Act introduced special compensation for particular categories of unemployed workers. This chapter is concerned with the nature of redundancy compensation and its relation to Unemployment Insurance. Unemployment Insurance is concerned with maintaining the income of the unemployed whether the unemployment is the result of redundancy or of temporary cyclical or seasonal fluctuations in demand. One possibility is to retain the normal Unemployment Insurance scheme but to divide the benefit recipients into the two categories, redundant and non-redundant, attaching different conditions of receipt to each category. The relationship in Britain between Unemployment Insurance and redundancy compensation is obscure and the danger of such obscurity is that arbitrary differences will arise in the treatment of different categories of workers who lose their jobs. In the case of Unemployment Insurance, selective benefits would be paid only to the unemployed whose unearned income fell below the minimum tolerable income level.
