This guide is an update To The 2001 Guide to worker displacement that was published as a response To The Asian financial crisis. The Guide, drawing on experience primarily in North America and during the transition process in Central and Eastern Europe, explores how enterprises, communities and workers can respond To The financial crisis and how to reduce potential job losses. This includes possible strategies for averting layoffs and promoting business retention by communities, enterprise managements and workers' association. The guide is primarily for use in industrialized and transition countries, and is aimed at policy makers, employers and workers in developing appropriate responses that promote worker retention and employment during the recession.

The essential argument of this book is that the current crisis of US unions ought to be considered in terms of the local context of labor-management relations; that is, the communities in which men and women live and work. Whether by design or necessity, the structure of New Deal national labor legislation has sustained, and maintained, distinctive local labor-management practices.