Paid To Leave

There will be a severance package for employees who lose their jobs. From what information has been released so far, it looks good. For each year of service two weeks of full pay will be awarded. Twelve years service equaling 6 months of salary is set as the maximum limit. In addition to that each employee will be given an extra 3 months full pay plus $2,000 for lost medical benefits, a $1,000 stipend to help with finding a new job, and if you sign a form letter saying you won't sue the company because you lost your job they'll give you an extra $3,000. The funny thing about signing this form letter is I'm confident any angry employee could successfully sue the company anyway and keep the money. For example, a case could be argued that employees felt they were under duress to sign. Whatever, if I lose my job here I'll scribble my name on their dumb paper and get the loot.

Federal income tax will be nasty with this plan. The severance package is being considered as a pay bonus which is fucked because the IRS is going to grip 42% right off the top of everyone's stack of cash. That's brutal. Most employees who have been with the company more than a few years will do fairly well though. Anyone who was just hired within the last year or two isn't going to get much after taxes. We pulled in a massive amount of new full time permanent employees with the tech ramp up recently and I have a bad feeling those folks are gonna get assed-out big time.

I've mentioned before that this company is extremely lawsuit afraid. In most situations that fear has been unwarranted, causing more trouble for everyone than it's worth. However this is probably the one time corporate litigation phobia is going to really be an advantage for all us pukes. We're being paid to shut up and go away. I think I'm going to be okay with that. Today I ran the numbers from the severance package formula with my monthly salary figured in. Because I have nearly ten years of service my payout is healthy. Dunno what I'll do for work if I bounce out of here but at least I won't have to worry about it for quite a while with money like that sitting in my bank account. I can probably take a year off and just relax. Maybe I'll go sit in public parks with a bottle wrapped up in a brown paper bag and pass out repeatedly for a few months. We'll see. Right now I'm trying to not stress. Instead I'm going to stay focused on testing boxes and I'll worry about being unemployed when it happens.