It's very difficult to imagine an American company doing this, especially in the face of declining revenue. American corporations have a ways to go when it comes to treating employees like human beings rather than resources.
There are multiple ways to look at this. In one respect, you could say that this generous "easing redundant employes out the door" policy hurts the company and the employees still in place as it diverts money that could be spent keeping the company in business by refining existing products and developing new ones. If the company goes under, everybody is hurt. And if you're not careful, your employees that can help the company the most may try to get laid off in order to fund their side projects.
On the other-hand, morale must be terrible at places like Nokia and Blackberry right now. Programs like this help the company as it creates loyalty and helps keep good employees in place as they know that there will be assistance if they do get laid off. But once again, it could create or hasten a death-spiral. Employees can see that these layoff programs are expensive so they may bail out to get theirs before the money runs out. Tough times. Touch choices.
Well, one of the costs of hiring and having employees is you have to ringfence some money for redundancy payments.
This is a completely predictable expense - a company shouldn't be put out of business by paying redundancy money any more than they should go out of business when the electricity bill comes in or the printer needs a new toner cartridge.
Another way to look at it is seeding the ecosystem to create new markets over the long term. Nokia knows about pivoting. Before they made phones, they made rubber boots!
Speaking as another European who has always been put off by the usual American conditions, money is not a very big concern to me beyond my (admittedly quite frugal) standard of living. Time is a far, far, far more important resource, and working in the USA seems to include insane hours and constant overtime and few vacations.
Also, I think you don't need that much money in Europe, thanks to things like socialized healthcare.
Agreed. As you get older too, you start to appreciate how much time is burned by working. It's good to work, just it shouldn't dominate your waking life.
Well a quick multiplier of 1.35 means $135k in USD yearly for a 6 figure salary. Well that's a rarity even for software developers here in US unless you are pretty darn good. BTW, how much is the average salary paid by american companies in Europe ?
living costs are much lower though, at least in the parts of the US where 100k are common. besides, what do you count as 'salary'? companies pay into the 401k and the social security, doesn't show up in the salary though. and they pay quite a bit depending on the actual salary.
The old Silicon Valley was this way. Hewlett-Packard did a 10% across-the-board pay cut and gave non-executive employees a day off every 2 weeks. If a startup had to cut staff, the people were let go with great references and introduced to investors so they could try their own startups. Even when people had to be let go, management would make sure it helped their careers in the long run... because Silicon Valley was still a world in which the little guy mattered.
The new Valley isn't that way, and that's actually a bit dangerous. I know someone who was let go from a startup, not given investor contact (or even a severance package) and he pretty much destroyed the place.
I had several family members work at Intel in the early 80's. I remember the stories about how Intel was known to really take care of their employees, even after they left the company.
