Editorial

The effects of the global recession are beginning to be felt intensely. Over the past few days STMicroelectronics announced that by the end of this year it will reduce its workforce by about 450 workers. Trelleborg, another long-established company, is also making a few scores of workers redundant after having reduced its working week because of a fall in demand for its products.

There is nothing more soul-destroying than the dole queue. The spectre of unemployment is today beginning to haunt workers who, so far, have generally not been affected by this economic and social scourge. We need to mobilise our resources to fight the dole queues with every weapon in our armoury.

Changes may be needed in the way we manage our social welfare system. There is no doubt that workers and their families, who find themselves deeply affected by this traumatic experience, need to be provided with financial help to ensure that they never become destitute. Only in this way can we avoid a corrosive socio-economic crisis.

However, more than financial assistance is needed. Social assistance must also take the form of high-quality retraining programmes. The profile of today's unemployed is likely to be very different from that of those who lost their jobs a decade ago.

We are beginning to see highly-skilled workers with even a tertiary level of education signing-on in unemployment offices. To get these people back on the job market we need to provide retraining programmes that go beyond those being offered, most of which cater for the acquisition of basic skills.

More important, we need to ensure that the lack of a continuous training culture that still exists in many local businesses is addressed by proper legislation. Where incentives for employers to train their workers consistently throughout their working lives have not worked we need proper legislation to make such training mandatory. Many EU countries, including Germany, are introducing legislation requiring employers to support employee learning through paid leave or to spend a percentage of annual payroll on training.

Trade unions will no doubt use their experience to negotiate the best terminal benefits for workers being made redundant. But they need to do more to protect jobs in the future by negotiating collective agreements that give importance to investment in workers through continuous training.

Governments throughout the world seem to be adopting certain common strategies to fight off the worst effects of the prevailing global recession, which is now turning into a real depression. They have committed enormous public funds for the building of roads, bridges and other infrastructural necessities. Some have also eased fiscal pressures so that families will, hopefully, spend more money and, thereby, revive the economic stagnation. They have also cut interest rates to record low levels in order to make borrowing for consumption and for investment more affordable.

These measures on their own, however, are unlikely to resolve the problem. Those workers who will end up without a job despite all these extraordinary measures can only benefit if their governments take specific interest in their particular circumstances. These workers will want to leave the dole queue as fast as they can. On their own they can do very little. With top-grade retraining schemes they can once again live the dream of leading a normal productive life for their own and their families' good and for the benefit of the economy.