Staff Training and Further Development in Place of Redundancies: A Swedish Example Available to Purchase

The Swedish government decided in 1994, as part of the so‐called 50,000 Swedish crowns scheme, to set aside a portion of the labour market budget for the further training and retraining of local government and country council employees. The present article reports on the experiences of the training effort that took place in 1994–1995 and provides a theoretical framework for discussing staff training as an alternative to redundancies in the case of “economic overstuffing” and as part of a strategy for lifelong learning. Staff training and further development can be viewed as direct labour market measures instead of as redundancies. This article is based on a large empirical study in municipalities and county councils that have used these measures. In the study it was shown that these market measures can be defended both economically and humanly in the sense that both contribute to strengthening internal mobility and increasing the worker's adaptability to the external labour market. At the same time, this conform part of a strategy for a more flexible structuring of working time.