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I think "made redundant" has been the British term for laid off for quite a while; though this is, IME, far less common in American usage. I think the distinction you are positing between them could be a good one to make, but I don't think its one that has ever been consistently applied in general usage of the terms in reference to business.

> In this case, the company is laying off a lot of its sales force and recruiting team while mumbling further content-free buzzwords about refocusing its strategy. Meaning, they aren't growing any more, so they won't be selling as much or recruiting as much.

Given that affected parts of the company are those most directly implicated in the regulatory violations that have produced the immediate problems, I wonder if there isn't another level of spin here, and whether this isn't more a set of firings to purge the problem units than a layoff.

I agree with you that the current usage of the word is now empty, as is most business jargon designed for press releases. Thus my opening phrase "Before 'being made redundant' became empty buzzspeak, ..." :-)

Normally in British English the phrase "made redundant" implies there is a payment made to the departing employees, normally of several months salary. The phrases "sacked", "fired" and "let go" do not imply that. It is unclear which applies from the article - it sounds like lay-offs in prose, but the words "made redundant" muddy this.

> Normally in British English the phrase "made redundant" implies there is a payment made to the departing employees, normally of several months salary. The phrases "sacked", "fired" and "let go" do not imply that.

The same is generally true in American English, with "laid off" replacing "made redundant" and "sacked" being uncommon for the other alternative (but "fired" and "let go" being quite common.)

>I think "made redundant" has been the British term for laid off for quite a while; though this is, IME, far less common in American usage.

A big part of the plot in the British Office tv show was watching Ricky Gervais fumble his department through a merger that ultimately made him redundant. He kept assuring the employees there would be no redundancies.

Zenefits using the term redundancies may just be colloquial British phrasing. They've got much greater PR problems now that make the semantics of layoffs vs redundancies seem a minor concern.

I think that's great you caught on to that. I used to work for a British company and they used the same lingo. Thought it sounded a little harsh at the time.

Yep. It's a general pattern: any term for "termination of employment" goes through the euphemism treadmill much, much faster than any other word or than we expect it to.

It used to feel like there was a distinction between being laid off (can't afford you anymore, have to scale down) vs being fired (you messed up and they don't want you anymore at any positive price). But gradually I heard "laid off" get used to mean any firing for any reason.

And it makes sense: anyone is going to want to make their termination reason sound better for them, while retaining plausible deniability -- "well, the word is ambiguous anyway". Plus, it's a sensitive topic where people don't want to reveal details of the reasons about third parties. So, expect any term for any termination reason get applied to broader and broader cases, to the point of absurdity.

"He was made redundant after groping the secretary."

"He was retired after they lost their major customer." But he's 35! "So?"

"She was downsized after using illegal accounting practices for the 15th time."

"The junior partner was let go after appearing drunk at a client presentation." (Note:"let go" can be a meaningful distinction in a case where leaving might have major penalties for the leaving employee but the managing partners waive those penalties.)

Not necessarily. It probably means they just overhired, which is a problem at a lot of companies.

They could just plan to get more out of a lower staffing level, this was fairly common in the "re-engineering" triggered layoffs of the early 90s.

My bet is we will see more layoffs like this because managers have erred on the side of overhiring. Now teams are overbuilt and there's no way they need as many employees as they have to achieve their goals.

So they lay them off. We'll be seeing more of this. Management will start erring on the side of cutting staff.

The one constant here is that management is always in error, it's just the direction that has implications for employees.

It doesn't appear (from this article, at least) that the company ever used that word. As far as I can tell it is an editorialization by author of the article.

Not necessarily. If MS decides to build Windows 12 from the ground up they may have a separate team work on Windows 11. After that project is done most of the Windows 11 team would be redundant. Edit: They even did something like this with NT 4.0, ME, and XP.

Similarly, if a catalog transitions to a website once that's done the legacy catalog team could simply be redundant.

"Redundant" is not a pure synonym for "unnecessary" or "obsolete," and in business-speak it used to have the meaning I shared above. It used to arise a lot in mergers, where "efficiencies" arose by consolidating functions and making entire departments "redundant."

If buggy-whips were to disappear as a business because Buggy 2.0 (a/k/a the automobile) comes along, it was not commonplace to say that buggy -whip manufacturers or their employees were "redundant," but to say they were "obsolete."

That seems closer to the Windows 12 vs. Windows 11 teams analogy to me.

What I think your missing industry leaders often can't grow market share. In that situation R&D is often focused on lowering costs which in some industry's directly translate to people. In this case the skill set is still valuable, you just need fewer people.

EX: ATM's did not remove the need for all bank tellers, but they removed the need for huge numbers of them.

I don't see what's missing. Those people are laid off.

If you go from 10 Windows Administrators to 2 Windows Administrators then the other 8 are redundant. If you go from 10 VAX administrators to 0 VAX administrators they are obsolete.

The difference is if you still need anyone with the skill set or not.

> The job to be done is no longer there. Therefore, those aren't redundancies, those are layoffs, pure and simple.

I would presume that there are still sales and recruiting jobs at Zenefits. Maybe "the jobs were made redundant" isn't quite as accurate as "Zenefits realized that the jobs were already redundant."