Seeing Glasgow Council trawling for redundancy volunteers by writing to all their 3,500 employees over 50, briefing them on the redundancy terms on offer including optimum pension entitlements and a severance deal, reminds me of how bad it was in previous recessions. Press reports state that Glasgow City Council “…staff will have until 31 March to accept the offers after which the terms will be reduced.”

Imagine the damage to the local economy as more 50 plus people are dumped into the unemployment market. Surely, the citizens of Glasgow, not least those who might become older jobseekers, are entitled to ask, “And what else will you be offering, as well as money, to help us?”

It is a question we should all be asking. And how much longer will we make do with a law offering 30 pieces of silver to those willing to sell their jobs when what we really need is help and investment?

Back in the early 80s when my union job took me round many workplaces in London and the South East of England, dealing with redundancies and factory closures became a recurring experience. So absorbed in the dismal ritual did I become that I lightened the hours gathering material for a doctoral thesis on the way. Sad but true.

At the price of several years of isolation and zero social life, I hence became an expert in this gloomiest of human experiences; the process of ejecting people from jobs and their generally forlorn struggles against the same.

Setting aside this personal context, I now believe our redundancy laws are peculiarly ill fitted for our modern age. Welcome though the redundancy cheque may be for those cast out of work, is it really the best form of help? Could we ever change it?

We need to encourage positive attitudes to new jobs and changes in careers but does the prospect of redundancy pay really do this? One person can be made redundant and stroll down the road into another job the next day. Another may spend years in frustrated idleness with little or no extra help to enhance his or her labour market position. The system is utterly unfit for purpose.

Redundancy payments are supposed to reflect a “property right” in the job. Noble idea though this is, no one really owns their job unless they own the business they work for. A better conceptual framework would be to assert property rights in our own employability. Every job should enhance one’s employability in some way by allowing us to acquire skills and knowledge that are developmental.

Employability should be something to jealously guard. A property right in one’s employability could lead to the notion that no employer should expend an individual’s employability without providing opportunities and support to replenish it.

And no-one whose employability has been depleted through neglect, should be “let go” without a proper employability replenishment programme. The outcome should be that gaining another job becomes a realistic expectation.

Shifting the emphasis from compensation for loss of a job to maintenance of employability in this way, would create a more dynamic economy. If this were coupled with job seekers allowances at a reasonably high percentage of former average pay, would that not make more sense than the false largesse of a redundancy handout? A small bonanza for some, a poisoned chalice for others.

I could go on about the opportunities missed back in the 1960s before the present Redundancy Payments Act was introduced. There were promises of something better which sadly came to nought. But we are where we are.

The Danish flexicurity system has become a paradigm for how it should be and what we should be aiming for. It is pretty much the scenario I have described above. Property rights of workers in a particular job have been traded in for rights to expect a job but the duty to retrain for it. It all merits closer examination.

Organisations often have to change but if we lived as though change were expected rather than a surprise attack, we would all be better for it. And people who have been around for some years, instead of growing better and better at one job but terrified of losing it, might have more to look forward to.