Abstract
The present study aims to discover the social–economic impact of an unanticipated and involuntary loss of employment retrenchment of workers, evaluating the efficacy of the law in this regard and tries to assess as to how persons who have lost their employment owing to retrenchment cope with the situation. The results or consequences of job loss have been studied by a number of psychologists and social sciences researchers. Their findings have shown that retrenchment has traumatic effects on a person’s life and his or her family. Even the employees who manage to survive, the company, the organization and the whole society experience the ill-effects of retrenchment. The situation in case of retrenchment is impetuous and unalterable. Employees who experience involuntary retrenchment react more negatively to unemployment and are more likely to perceive retrenchment as a one-sided breach of psychological contract with the organization. Some authors have coined the phrase ‘chain of adversity’ to express the downward spiral of misfortune that some workers experience after retrenchment. The psychology literature describes the event (shock of job loss due to retrenchment) as ‘illness’ and the change in personal and career front it initiates as ‘recovery’ from the ‘illness’.
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