Pay cut consultations could trigger redundancy payments Companies which follow computer maker Hewlett-Packard's lead and attempt to cut staff wages risk triggering redundancy law payouts if they do not consult staff properly, an employment lawyer has warned. Hewlett-Packard is seeking to cut the pay of its 300,000 staff by between 2.5% and 15%, depending on the level of job they …
Take less money or find yourself a new job........................ oh and you are also putting all you mates jobs at risk as well.
Now if I worked at a bank and not Jaguar it wouldn't be an issues because old Mandy has loads of money for the banks... just no bright idea's for the rest of the country!
I'll get my coat. A bit obvious that one really
The problem with using HP as an example of 'innovative' thinking is that the company has form - and employees remember.
A few years ago under the fragrant Carly, in (a difficult) quarter, employees were asked to take a 10% pay cut for the quarter - to 'save jobs'. All of my team (I got the report) took the hit and I believe uptake was high. There was a good sense of camaraderie. A short time after the close, a substantial and well planned redundancy programme was announced.
Now it might have been the case that the pay cut was not well enough subscribed and this was plan B. It might also have been the case that this was a cynical move to both reduce costs and remove unnecessary workforce.
Within the company you can guess what the prevailing mood was. I think the 'fool me once...' ethos for those workers who do not have to take the pay cut will prevail.
Talking to people within the company, the death of the old (generous) pension scheme is widely anticipated, redundancy benefits for many workers have been reduced by 15% in the last three months and there is an expectation that HP will cut them further based on 'industry benchmarks' - funny how they always fall... Taking an unnecessary pay cut may well mean that existing workers in the UK (a) have their pension rights reduced, (b) have their redundancy benefits cut twice - once based on pay and then cut again and (c) get fired anyway.
I would be more inclined to accept something like this (as opposed to mass involuntary redundancies) if it were a flat paycut across ALL levels (including senior management) and the managers were told 'no bonuses this year'.
But like that's going to happen! Probably the management will be given large bonuses for 'keeping staff salary costs minimised'....
If your job is surplus to requirement they will fire you anyway. The only time a pay cut is in order is if they really need your job but the company will be fucked without it. HP would not come under that category. Sounds like cut pay then slash and burn anyway.
Taking a pay cut never saves jobs that are redundant anyway. Remember that.
The concept of reduced pay to preserve people working is seductive, but as has been pointed out the issue is that the pay never recovers. A better potential solution is to pay 20% less, but require 20% less work. This also doesn't really work, since the workload is not reduced, and if you can do 100% of your work in 80% of the time, you should be made redundant for being a slacker and gold bricker.
Interestingly, few if any companies realize how to run efficiently. The problem is the cruft processes that build up. If white collar workers are laid off, not all the processes can any longer be managed -- so some processes are discarded. Hello? Why were these wasteful processes still being done if they clearly were unnecessary as demonstrated by the process disappearance after a layoff? If management was more than a pack of dullards they would realize that processes should be actively pruned and the spare work hours put to good use improving products and increasing sales, or doing whatever it is that makes your work valuable to someone else.
The incompetence of the world's industry is astonishing (and we won't even touch the government, where an empire of useless processes is the preferred method for increasing one's pay).
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