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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Better it be required by law and provided by the government than you hoping you'll get severance and being beholden to a company's "generosity", and the company include the additional tax payments as cost of doing business (same as the other employment taxes they're required to pay).

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The issue is severance during company bankruptcy.

Nobody ever expects companies to be 'generous' that's not a thing - the issues are in contracts like anything else.

Severance is never guaranteed though, bankruptcy or otherwise. If a company is going bankrupt, of course they're not going to have the funds to pay severance when closing up shop. Unless I'm misunderstanding the point (and the quotations around generosity were intended to convey that in bankruptcy, that doesn't exist).

Regardless, I suppose the end result should be to make unemployment kick in faster so you don't need an insolvent company to provide a severance they don't have the funds to provide.

Severance can be put in a contract like anything else, so it's as 'guaranteed' as any other obligation so long as the company can pay for it.

If severance is in your contract, and the company is insolvent, you are SOL. It is not like any other obligation, as an example, unemployment: your company pays into unemployment funds every month (mandated by government), which is what allows you to collect if you're let go, regardless of their solvency situation.

A severance agreement with a bankrupt company is worthless.

Yes, severance is like every other obligation, different only probably in seniority.

Obviously if the company is bankrupt they cannot pay.

Don't work for companies that are going, or could be going bankrupt. In the vast majority of the cases the writing is on the wall long before that happens.

Payroll taxes are just another form of income tax, the company doesn't really pay it, the employee does, economically speaking that money would go to the employee were those payroll taxes not to exist. The the co. does pay it is just an accounting issue.

And for most software companies, seniority is irrelevant. There aren't any assets to split up, so you'll be the first in line to get your slice of nothing.

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