Is there anyone out there that can help me with...........?

Question

Socio-economics? I have been co-opted to a workplace 'workshop' (Unions and Management) on the subject which has the following aims:

1) To ensure a common understanding of the impact of the decommissioning programme and what can be done to address socio-economic concerns.
2) To exchange views and seek to agree a way forward through the development of a shared action and communication plan.
3) To explore issues around and opportunities for the socio-economic agenda.
4) To ensure all key parties are focused, as far as is practicable, on the same strategy.

Can anyone help me with the basics (what the subject means and the type of questions to ask) as I have no knowledge or experience in the subject?

Answer 1

Dissection:

1) To ensure a common understanding of the impact of the decommissioning programme and what can be done to address socio-economic concerns.

Decommissioning: people will have to move from their present jobs, some are likely to lose their jobs.
What must be done to that?
- Self-Selection: Offer voluntary retirement
- Retrench: Review who will be fired, and calculate the costs of redundancy.
- Humane: engage a job agency to help those who are leaving

2) To exchange views and seek to agree a way forward through the development of a shared action and communication plan.

How to go about the above and inform the workers of what's going to happen.

3) To explore issues around and opportunities for the socio-economic agenda.

How to minimise drop in morale, generally by offering good benefits to those leaving; try 1 month for every year worked.

4) To ensure all key parties are focused, as far as is practicable, on the same strategy.

Fluff.


Someone's got to do the dirty job, huh?

Cheers!

Answer 2

To tell the truth this is to make some one feel Good. Go looking good and net work, and meet other union and management, enjoy the donuts, and you may be surprised for about five minutes they will give you some piece of importing information that was dressed up in a whole day or afternoon dog and pony show.

Look for the meeting in the meeting, this is were all the plans are relay made.

Answer 3

I think these points were written by managers and not by economists.

The gist is looking for equitable treatment of all parties. This is hard as it depends upon each persons view of fair, and one persons view of fair can be very different from another persons. Look at Rawlsian, Egalitarian, Utilitarian and then at Pareto's criterion for establishing what is fair and who has more weight, there are other criterion you could use to extract other answers.

The rest is just communication timetables and the more mundane stuff, filling in calenders etc.

I think they could have made more effort when writing the outline as it makes what could be quite fun, in an argumentative way into something that looks rather dull.

Enjoy