0 a situation in which people lose their jobs, or companies stop doing business, because of economic difficulties:
The shakeout in the labour market after Christmas usually makes January a bad month for unemployment.
There has been a shakeout of inefficient corporations.
1 a difficult economic situation in which people lose their jobs and unsuccessful businesses close down:
2 the process of changing an organization to be more successful, especially by removing people:
shakeout of sb/sth The company announced the shakeout of its senior management.
There is another purpose in this shakeout of planning permissions and placing a limit on the life of a planning permission.
There are indications that we shall very soon get the beginnings of the shakeout.
At the same time, there was a shakeout, as it is called, in the labour market.
Recent years have seen a great shakeout in both those industries, and there were many redundancies.
There has been a big shakeout in the industry: both locally and nationally, there has been a considerable reduction in the number of its employees.
So we must reconcile ourselves to the shakeout continuing.
That has probably done more than anything else in the last six months to accentuate the shakeout in labour.
I believe that the great industrial shakeout, as it has been called, is over.
