offered a buyout for several months of salary to quit.
That’s actually what I understand a layoff is. The company must compensate for some time in relation to the antiquity of the working relationship.
You might be referring to a firing? That’s when the company doesn’t need to compensate you because you fucked up or something. Where I live, Spain, firing someone is very hard but laying someone off isn’t.
farmgineer@nord.pub 1 week ago
If a company wants to get rid of a permanent employee, they have very limited tools when it’s non-consential. If they claim it’s financial, they have to (in theory at least) prove that to unilaterally dismiss and that can come with the burden of freezing hiring and other things.
To unilaterally dismiss otherwise, they need to prove gross/malicious bad conduct, performance problems (this still requires a long PIP process), or reassign the employee somewhere and have the employee refuse. For the last one, it can’t legally be too onerous to on the employee, but case precedent is hit or miss if it makes it to court. As I understand, most prefer to settle out of court and pay the employee to go away.
In my mind, layoffs are for downsizing head count rather than firing which is targeted to that employee.
As I understand it, certain numbers of actions to reduce headcount can also trigger things like hiring freezes, but I don’t know much about that.