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Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

What's the difference between being fired and laid off?

In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think).

"Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new people at the same time, for the same job(s).

Any employer being more aggressive than this will probably be taken to an employment tribunal.

In the States, I've heard you guys use the terms synonymously, but it always sounded a little weird. Your employment law is awful for employees though, by comparison.

No, we use the terms the same way in the US, just the protections behind them are weaker (and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way).

You might be thinking of the phrase "was let go", which is just a nicer way of saying "got fired".

"Laid off" here means the same as in the UK: you were sent home because your job function isn't needed anymore, or because the company is downsizing.

> and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way

You mean as a reasonably well-off employee who was lucky enough to have picked a growing field when you went to uni. On the other hand, if that field ever stops growing for any reason... you might see why people enjoy stability and the ability to plan ahead in their work life.

Some people think that pro-employee laws are not in fact good for employees.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, it's super uncharitable to dismiss them in this way.

Pro-employee laws are not good for employees in the success case - that you're a top 10% worker in a field that is growing and has lots of demand. The thing is, if you think about the failure case - you're a disposable cog in a field that's stagnating - there's issues which need to be solved, unless you're a staunch libertarian with a belief that people who are unable to find work should die. Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?

The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.

> Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.

Really? I thought it was that it smells a bit too much like communism.

Which seems to be gradually becoming less of a problem over time, even here in the USA.

Socialism, not communism.

And systematiclly dismantling the middle class through public policy and economic upheaval does that to a country.

Full speed ahead on stronger safety nets, even if it means higher taxes.

Well, "why should I pay for my neighbour's re-education when they should've just picked right in the first place?" - if you are lucky enough to pick a field which grows for the rest of your life, and you're a reasonably good worker, you're never going to take advantage of that and so your neighbour gets more than you from the Government. Not fair! /s

Is that actually a prevalent attitude, though? I mean, it's stupid... someone else retraining is easily still having it harder than someone who "picked right". And in the end, I'd much rather help pay for someone's education than have to walk past them on the street, begging for money.

> there's issues which need to be solved

Yes, and some people think that pro-employee laws make these issues worse.

Again, you don't need to agree with them, but you don't get to dismiss them as simply not caring.

> Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?

That's the thing I don't get. In the grand scheme of things, it is much less costly to an economy to pay to retrain someone than it is to pay them to do a redundant job. It's even less costly than doing nothing and kicking them to the curb.

That's rather undeservedly flippant.

Actually I picked a dying field at uni. Well, not a dying one, but it's become very difficult over the past 10-15 years to find a job doing digital hardware design. Fortunately I gave up on that quickly and switched to software (something I was lucky enough to start picking up well before uni).

But I think that misses the point. We shouldn't halt progress in the name of job security. I'm fine with slowing progress a little; hell, even in the US it's customary (even though not required by law) to pay a decent severance package during layoffs. But I just don't get this whole idea that you're entitled to a job (and job security) just because you trained for it.

I also don't get the resistance toward retraining, aside from the obvious issue that retraining takes time and money, and in the meantime you have to feed and shelter yourself (but this sort of thing can and should be solved via social safety nets). Sure it would be easy to be able to have a single job for the rest of your life, but that's just not how life works, or should work. Things get obsoleted all the time, and that doesn't mean we should legally require private enterprises to keep paying someone to do useless work.

I do very much object to how difficult it can be to vanilla fire someone in many places in Europe. They've gone way too far with that one. Extra protections for layoffs are fine, but if someone is consistently underperforming, it should be possible to get rid of them immediately and without any sort of severance. I've been at a couple very small companies in the US where the lack of ability to do that sort of thing could have killed the company.

You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest!

Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpful (i.e. get it over with) vs. letting me twist in the wind for a few months... or even have a hard talk with me to see if I might be useful elsewhere in the company because I was bored etc.

But the procedure they used to downsize the workforce earlier that year before that was cruel - straight out of the Victorian era...

Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss...

Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.

It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court.

The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.

It's a thing to do carefully; especially in a small industry. Unless the situation is pretty messed up it's generally better to take a small hit than become known as someone who litigates against their employer.

On the other hand, full respect to anyone who stands up for themselves when the situation warrants it.

I've heard that that practise (what a name!) Is relatively common in Japan: I've never heard of it in the UK before.

I have heard of "gardening leave" though: where you're left on full salary but kept out of the building for your notice period, to stop you passing up to date market info to your new company. (It's the only legal way I know of in the UK to implement a non-compete clause.)

I love the fact that no one seems to know why we say "sent to Coventry" as well.

Probably related to Coventry being "ignored" in WWII by British officials so that German wouldn't catch on that the enigma machine was broken.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11486219

The phrase is much older than that..

>Grose's The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - 1811:

>>To send one to Coventry; a punishment inflicted by officers of the army on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.[0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry

Wow, I wonder how effective time-out was on infantrymen of the early 19th century and how often it was enforced. It seems like an analog to solitary confinement while still forcing you to be a contributing member of your armed forces.

Really not going find a new job easily if you say you have been fired vs redundancy as that implies you did something wrong.

This is actually fine by me: if you want to pay me to do nothing, that's fine -- I'll just look at it as conditional severance. As an employer, you should know that I'll be using the time to look for other jobs on my phone though.

Japan does something similar, called "chasing-out rooms": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...

In Australia that's generally called "special projects".

You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum.

https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay

Thanks for correcting me, clearly I've only ever heard about it from people who had been working somewhere for a long time!

You may be thinking of voluntary redundancy terms which can be very lucrative

And a in IR/HR terms a lay off is not exactly the same as a redundancy.

With redundancy the job is 100% gone, with a layoff the job may come back ie a factory may lay off the night shift - with expectation that if things pick up the nightshift will be re hired.

You are laid off when the company is downsizing, has no need for your services or cannot pay your wages.

You get fired when you fail to perform adequately at your job.

Technically none, but "fired" tends to refer specifically to when there was some specific employee conduct, e.g. failure to fulfill responsibilities, which forced the company to let the employee go. "Laid off" is a broader term that doesn't carry the same negative connotation and is more appropriate when, say, a company is strapped for cash and lets go of someone to free up money in the budget.

Being fired generally means you did something wrong wrong. Laid off means the company is getting rid of people to reduce costs or due to removing the position, for example due to change of strategy.

One generally implies personal fault, the other implies side-effect of business.

Fired - you did something wrong, incompetent (or pissed someone off) and they are doing it specifically to you.

Laid off - your group is redundant or discontinued, they have no need for you or your team/product, they're closing an overseas business unit, or culling 10% of their staff. You're in the wrong boat at the wrong time.

It has different connotations.

If you're laid off, you can collect unemployment more easily.

immediately vs 3 months waiting period as far as I recall

For California, that is wrong. You can claim right away if you are fired. The employer can dispute it however they have to prove they tried to rectify the situation. The way the system works, the former employee has to dispute the unemployment rejection if the employer wants to try to claim it was a valid firing. So if you do get fired and there was not a pattern of behavior or something that you were warned about, then you simply appeal, state your case and the judge will almost certainly reject the employers false claim.

Unfortunately, I know this by experience. I was fired for some fishy business and it was obvious at the hearing. So always file for unemployment unless you are certain it will not be granted. Unemployment also qualifies you for health insurance through Covered California.

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