Miss Cellaneous
10-31-18, 3:52pm
Thankfully, this is not a question I need answers to! But in the past couple of months, I've had conversations with a few people about severance pay that have left me puzzled.
One was with a person whose job has been eliminated company-wide. She was offered 6 months of severance pay, or she could take a different job at a slightly lower rate of pay. She opted for the severance pay and left the company. When the six months were up, she came back to a job pretty much like the job she had previously rejected. Because she had a longer than three-month break from employment at that company, she lost any employment history with them, per their rules. So the previous 17 years that she had worked for them and that would have counted towards retirement benefits, and how much PTO she gets and a few other benefits were gone. But she feels that getting the six month's of severance was a better deal than taking the job she was offered.
The second was with a friend who is a manager at a store for a large, nation-wide retail chain. She is trying to hire a new commission salesperson for a specific department and not having much luck. When Sears announced that it was closing the store in the mall where her store is, she went and tried to recruit some of the salespeople there, who sell the same products and who will be out of a job soon. Most of them were not interested or at least not interested right now, as they will need to work until the store closes in three months or so to get a severance package.
My take has always been that having a job is better than taking severance. Severance runs out. Hopefully, jobs will last much longer. So if I were one of the salespeople in the second example, I'd jump at the chance to interview for the job, because the job might not be there when the store finally closed. And I would prefer the security of knowing I had a job to the "big payout" of severance pay.
Is there something I'm missing here, as to why everyone seems to want the severance rather than a steady job?
One was with a person whose job has been eliminated company-wide. She was offered 6 months of severance pay, or she could take a different job at a slightly lower rate of pay. She opted for the severance pay and left the company. When the six months were up, she came back to a job pretty much like the job she had previously rejected. Because she had a longer than three-month break from employment at that company, she lost any employment history with them, per their rules. So the previous 17 years that she had worked for them and that would have counted towards retirement benefits, and how much PTO she gets and a few other benefits were gone. But she feels that getting the six month's of severance was a better deal than taking the job she was offered.
The second was with a friend who is a manager at a store for a large, nation-wide retail chain. She is trying to hire a new commission salesperson for a specific department and not having much luck. When Sears announced that it was closing the store in the mall where her store is, she went and tried to recruit some of the salespeople there, who sell the same products and who will be out of a job soon. Most of them were not interested or at least not interested right now, as they will need to work until the store closes in three months or so to get a severance package.
My take has always been that having a job is better than taking severance. Severance runs out. Hopefully, jobs will last much longer. So if I were one of the salespeople in the second example, I'd jump at the chance to interview for the job, because the job might not be there when the store finally closed. And I would prefer the security of knowing I had a job to the "big payout" of severance pay.
Is there something I'm missing here, as to why everyone seems to want the severance rather than a steady job?