ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the extent to which redundancy, redeployment and resettlement are alternative courses of action for a company faced with a local labour-force surplus, with the experience of our industries, and with the more general problems of labour- force adjustment. When a company announces that a plant or part of a plant is to close, the number of job redundancies and the number of potential worker redundancies is equal to the employment at the date of announcement. The chemical industry cases lead one to the conclusion that employers were unwilling to consider redundancy as an alternative to transfer or resettlement unless it was impossible to avoid it. Redundancy schemes were in existence before the cases occurred though special provisions were arranged in some instances, and the levels of compensation were in advance of the normal practice of the time. The Redundancy Payments Act goes some way to preventing financial hardship for those employees covered, but several problems remain.
