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Since the 1970s scholars have shown an increasing interest in the study of the social and economic consequences of plant closure. One strand of research addresses the topic from an economic perspective, investigating the impact of plant closure on workers’ occupational trajectory and financial situation. The main interests of these studies are reemployment rates, unemployment durations and wage differences between the pre- and post-displacement job. Another strand of research strives at understanding the nonpecuniary costs of unemployment, addressing the consequences of job displacement in terms of workers‘ well-being and social life. We try to bridge these different research interests and will propose a model to investigate the impact of plant closure on workers’ lives in a more encompassing way.

In Switzerland there is no data publicly available for workers who lost their job because their plant shut down. For this reason, we ran our own survey. This chapter presents this survey including its design and the procedure we chose to collect data. The chapter is organized as follows: we first discuss whether using plant closure data may alleviate the problem that unemployment is a selective phenomenon and that particular groups of workers are more prone to lose their job than others. Next, we present out sampling strategy and discuss how potential survey bias may threaten the validity of our data. We address our data collection procedure and explain how we linked survey data to register data. We go on to analyze potential bias in the data that we collected and describe the construction of a control group. We then discuss the main limits of our study. Finally, we the institutional and labor market context relevant for our study.

Previous research on displaced workers’ labor market prospects shows that workers with a higher educational level are substantially more likely to return to employment than low-educated workers. There seem to be two main reasons for this finding. First, the demand for high-skilled labor is rising as a consequence of the automation of production processes and technological change that is skill-biased in favor of highly educated workers. Second, education is an important signal to employers about workers’ unobserved abilities such as their ability to learn. We therefore hypothesize that low- and mid-educated workers encounter more difficulties in finding a job than highly educated workers (hypothesis H1, see Chap. ).

In the light of older workers’ difficulties in returning to employment after job displacement it is fundamental to analyze a third pathway older workers may take beside reemployment and unemployment: early retirement. The question here at stake is whether workers are involuntarily pushed out of the labor market and subsequently suffer from social exclusion or whether they experience this option as an alleviation of their critical situation. Some studies have shown that older job seekers choose this pathway primarily as a better alternative to long-term unemployment (Chan and Stevens 2001; Ichino et al. 2007). Other studies found that pull factors such as generous early retirement plans, being financially well off or having an economically inactive spouse may incite older workers to leave the labor force before the official retirement age (Knuth and Kalina 2002: 414).

About 90 % of the reemployed and unemployed workers in our study indicated they had searched for a job. While finding a job after displacement is challenging for all workers, some manage to return quickly to the active labor force whereas others remain unemployed for over a year or even arrive at the end of eligibility for unemployment benefits. These differences may translate into diverging career outcomes and quality of life. In particular, since in modern societies individuals’ social status strongly depends on their participation in the economic production system, unemployment, especially if it is extended, may trigger a feeling of failure and a downgrading of workers’ social status (Gallie and Paugam 2000: 1).

In modern economies, deindustrialization shifts employment out of the manufacturing sector. A prominent argument expects that the decline of job opportunities in manufacturing forces displaced industrial workers to switch to the service sector (Cha and Morgan 2010: 1137). Since the skill profiles of manufacturing workers are likely not to correspond to the skill requirements of similarly qualified and paid jobs in the services, displaced industrial workers may experience an occupational downgrading and in the worst cases be reemployed in low-end service jobs (Iversen and Cusack 2000: 326–7; Bonoli 2007: 498).

The two preceding chapters suggest that displaced manufacturing workers in Switzerland have comparatively good reemployment chances – with the exception of the older workers. However, finding a job does not guarantee that displaced workers will experience a successful occupational transition after plant closure and that they can continue their careers without major ruptures. Indeed, workers may have accepted major wage losses.

Wages are only one dimension of the quality of workers’ new jobs. Other aspects also matter for the workers’ life and career opportunities. It has been argued that work is intimately related to other social, economic and political issues (Kalleberg 2009: 8). For instance, job insecurity not only increases workers’ levels of stress (De Witte 1999), but may also make them risk averse. Parents with unstable jobs thus may invest less in their children’s education, which affects the children’s long-term opportunities and quality of life (Esping-Andersen 2008: 75).

Glen Elder (1994: 6) pointed out that individuals’ lives are highly interdependent – or in other words – and that social regulation and support come about through these relationships. Consequently, the analysis of economic and social processes needs to account for the social relationships in which individuals are embedded. In this light, we argue that plant closure usually does not affect only the displaced workers but also their spouses, families, friends and perhaps even the larger community in which they live. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon are on the one hand that the job loss of a relevant breadwinner affects the financial situation of a household. On the other hand, reduced well-being is likely to harm the quality of social relationships within and outside the household. Moreover, how the displaced workers cope with job loss critically depends on how their significant others respond to this critical event.