Key Elements of a Labor Program
REDEPLOYMENT SUPPORT
Design and Implementation of Redeployment Programs
Counseling
Job-Search Assistance
Retraining
Employee Enterprise
Job Creation Initiatives
Material and Sources
Counseling
Counseling is the first, and minimum, level of support that the implementing agency can put into place to help displaced workers. There are many types of counseling. Although cost-effective, counseling is often neglected.
Types of Counseling
Severance payments may be the largest amount of money that workers ever receive. Providing prudent financial advice is a critical part of counseling.
The content of worker counseling can include:
- Trauma counseling: Job loss is a clear case of potential trauma in the lives of workers, and one component of the counseling process is to provide support and assistance to those who are particularly distressed by the event. Redeployment counselors may lack these skills and there is scope for involving NGOs with skills in these areas.
- Financial counseling: This is particularly important because severance may be the largest sum of money a worker receives in his or her life. Counseling can help people make prudent investment decisions by providing advice on:
- How severance has been calculated.
- Options for investing money (choices and risks).
- Investing in self-employment. Experience shows that many recipients of severance pay assume (wrongly) that they need to invest large amounts to start a business, when in practice a more cautious "start small and test the market" approach may be needed.
- The need to protect severance pay from fraudulent investment schemes set up to exploit the sudden increase in liquidity in a community where many people are receiving severance payments.
- Helping prepare workers (particularly in rural communities) for the sudden arrival of large numbers of "extended family" seeking to benefit from the perceived windfall.
- Counseling on job opportunities, redeployment, and training services provides information to workers on how to find new jobs and other income-earning opportunities, as well as how to access redeployment services (training, small business support, placement, and job-search services). There is some evaluation evidence (for example, Blomquist 2002) that counseling plus training are more effective than training alone.
Timing, Location, and Frequency of Counseling
Counseling can start when the first announcements have been made to workers about potential retrenchment. Two phases can be identified:
- Prelayoff counseling, which will focus on:
- Providing accurate information to workers and their families on severance programs, possible training opportunities, the timing of activities, selection procedures, and treatment of staff housing, among other things. This helps improve workers' decisionmaking and avoids damaging rumors.
- Establishing facilities for counseling (and job-search assistance), which may be located within the workplace or in a separate facility that workers can easily access.
- Postlayoff counseling: Counseling during this phase can become more intensive but should not distract the worker from his or her own job-hunting efforts.
The workplace is often the best location for counseling, particularly for early interventions and prelayoff counseling. Improving employee accessibility to information about training opportunities is key. Information can be made available at various locations:
- In the premises of the utility or PPI plan (easiest for workers and the most cost-effective location for initial counseling)
- In temporary rented accommodations (useful where the redeployment program needs to distance itself from difficult separation process)
- Through mobile visits (for counseling or training of smaller groups)
- At job fairs or meetings; in the community, using facilities of training institutions, local government, or other partners; at traditional meeting places; or in workers' homes.
Materials provided for workers should be in their own language. If many workers are illiterate, redeployment programs need to make more use of radio, video, group meetings, and means for providing information via other people in the community who meet workers face to face (for example, health workers or workplace "peer counselors").
How much counseling is required? Intuitively, a single session is unlikely to be sufficient to help workers dealing with significant job-loss trauma or challenges in finding new income. In India practical experience with national and state-level schemes has found that repeated visits are necessary.
Designing an Effective Counseling Program
Training and counseling services can be contracted out to separate independent agencies.
Counseling before and after severance is a relatively low-cost measure. Hess (1997) estimated counseling costs on the order of US$100 per worker. In practice the costs have been significantly lower. In state-level programs in India counseling costs have been estimated at about US$10 per retired worker, equivalent to about 10 percent of the cost of training delivered to each worker. The Toolkit's CD-ROM contains a sample spreadsheet that facilitates the calculation of the costs of setting up a counseling program.
Spreadsheet for estimating the costs of counseling.
Counseling is relatively low cost, but that does not always mean it will be effective. The implementing agency can improve effectiveness if:
Counseling is an underdeveloped skill in many developing countries. Additional training may be necessary to develop enough counseling capacity for the redeployment program.
- There is rapid mobilization of counseling services. In some cases workers may disperse to their homes very soon after severance so it is essential to deliver counseling advice before that happens. For the implementing agency this means that operating budgets, recruiting and training of counseling staff, and counseling materials all need to be in place well before workers start leaving the enterprise. A minimum of six months is ideally needed prior to the formal announcement of retrenchment so as to coordinate all the resources (staff, materials) necessary to set up a counseling program for a major work force restructuring program.
- There is early attention to building capacity in counseling. The implementing agency can address this by:
- Contracting a training provider. Counseling is an underdeveloped skill in many developing countries, and the implementing agency may need to look to NGOs with experience in disaster counseling, conflict resolution, and negotiation for "training the trainers."
- Using competitive bidding mechanisms to identify a range of potential service providers from government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector.
- Recruiting and training local counselors. Some programs have successfully selected young college graduates as counselors for privatization redeployment programs. Local counselors have the advantage that they come from the same communities as the workers; and their local sensitivities and language skills mean that they can be quickly effective when they have had induction training.
- Using peer counselors–that is, other employees from within the workplace.
- There is rapid feedback from counseling, gathered by actively seeking out the view of the counselors in the field, not just their managers. Implementing agency managers should attend some counseling sessions and listen to the counselors as they share their experiences. The best feedback on the real problems that workers face will come from those closest to the work–from workers and counselors and not from office managers.
- There is some degree of independence of the counseling service so that the advice is not compromised. This means:
- Keeping counselors independent of tasks that are properly the work of the utility/PPI enterprise managers–for example, the announcement of layoffs or the selection of workers for redundancy. Counselors should be associated with helping the worker, not with the retrenchment process itself.
- Ensuring that counselors are as independent as possible from the training program. Where counseling and training are combined, there is a risk that counselors become sales agents for the training programs and push workers to inappropriate courses simply to boost the numbers of "trained" workers.
