A multiple objective approach to workforce redeployment planning

In recent years, increasing worldwide competition has often resulted in a spate of plant closures and labor cutbacks. As a consequence, job security has been a growing concern of both employees and employers alike. Declining labor productivity, in turn, can lead to gradual loss of the company’s competitive edge over its competitors. As learned from the Japanese success, a better way to stop such a vicious circle is a long-term commitment to ‘no-layoff’ policies. A no-layoff policy may be tenable by utilizing a redeployment strategy with which some U.S. companies are starting to experiment. The key to success of redeployment is measuring its effectiveness and tackling its various related issues. This paper attempts to do so by developing a multiple objective quantitative model which captures many realistic variations of redeployment.