Has Anyone Benefitted from Redundancy?

luckbox

I couldn’t wait for a round of redundancy and to get accepted for it at a former job. The lump sum really opened up opportunities for me (IT Contractor with no financial pressure) and I am in a far better position now. Didn’t need any of the money so ultimately it will bring retirement earlier.

The drawback was that I probably stayed 4/5 years longer than I should have at that company waiting for my turn.

Exodi

Veteransaver said:

If it happens at the right stage in life it can be extremely beneficial, Eg in later life coming up for retirement with many years service.
I know a few people who benefited from the removal of mandatory retirement ages, they worked a few years past their original company pension retirement age and were then made redundant with a large payout on 10-20 years service, as well as a better pension!

From my perspective (as a company director), it was an extremely frustrating change. We have several staff members past retirement age and in a few of them we have seen clear downturns in accuracy/performance.

One of our admin staff for example (who's been with the business about 30 years) now spends the entire day raising order onto the system that our younger staff members can do in a couple of hours, couples with this mistakes are not uncommon and I find myself checking their work.

It is not an attractive proposition for a business to spend tens of thousands of pounds making someone at retirement age redundant (as much as I expect employees would think all their Christmas's had come at once - as your friends can attest). Alternatively, it is not an attractive proposition to pursue dismissal on capability grounds (the optics are bad also - claiming that someone that has worked somewhere for 30 years can't do their job). So we're stuck. We've unfortunately seen a downturn in demand lately and mentioned the possibility of redundancies, and of course all we got were people at retirement age throwing their hat into the ring.

Tucosalamanca

Exodi said:

Veteransaver said:

If it happens at the right stage in life it can be extremely beneficial, Eg in later life coming up for retirement with many years service.
I know a few people who benefited from the removal of mandatory retirement ages, they worked a few years past their original company pension retirement age and were then made redundant with a large payout on 10-20 years service, as well as a better pension!

From my perspective (as a company director), it was an extremely frustrating change. We have several staff members past retirement age and in a few of them we have seen clear downturns in accuracy/performance.

One of our admin staff for example (who's been with the business about 30 years) now spends the entire day raising order onto the system that our younger staff members can do in a couple of hours, couples with this mistakes are not uncommon and I find myself checking their work.

It is not an attractive proposition for a business to spend tens of thousands of pounds making someone at retirement age redundant (as much as I expect employees would think all their Christmas's had come at once - as your friends can attest). Alternatively, it is not an attractive proposition to pursue dismissal on capability grounds (the optics are bad also - claiming that someone that has worked somewhere for 30 years can't do their job). So we're stuck. We've unfortunately seen a downturn in demand lately and mentioned the possibility of redundancies, and of course all we got were people at retirement age throwing their hat into the ring.

That's a good point.

I remember in 2008 being 'let go' as I was only a temp worker.

Myself and many (youngish) colleagues were doing a great job, on dismissal day the site manager couldn't apologise enough.

He never said, but we knew his hands were tied. He had no choice but to keep on long term permanent workers, many of whom were deadwood and a drain on the business.
The redundancy bill would have been huge and he had to follow orders from above.

Ironically, 18months later the entire site was closed and the work moved back to USA.
If they would have paid redundancy, productivity would have improved and with a far lower wage bill.
The site might have remained feasible. For the most part, they had a brilliant team.
As it was, they ended up paying an extra year's redundancy and had substantial costs to decommission the site.
Funny old world, 2008-2010 was a crazy time...

LightFlare

My son got laid off and received a generous (above statutory) payout.

He took a month off just to “chill” and got a new job pretty easily that paid more and had better hours etc than his previous one

artyboy

I've had 2 very decent 6-figure packages. The first time I wasn't exactly playing the game. The latest one I absolutely was. But my industry is one that is pretty generous in enhanced packages...

Mrs Arty is hoping that she can engineer it in a few years when she's had enough. THAT will be a big payoff given length of service...