The Idler

How to get made redundant

Want to quit your job but need a pay-off? Andy Franks has the answer

It might not be the ultimate answer, but a spot of redundancy could be just what you’re looking for. A generous payout could buy you a much-needed sabbatical from the modern world, an opportunity to nourish your soul and heal your wounds before returning to the miseries of work. With careful budgeting, a decent redundancy could give you months of idling. It may even give you the time and money you need to escape properly.
So how do you do it? Well, getting made redundant is something of an art, and great cunning is needed. It’s no good hanging around for years, fantasizing that your company will go down the tubes or get bought out by a multinational. You need to be pro-active about things. But it can be done, and enough of us have now been through it for there to be some valuable best practice that urgently needs to be shared among the idler community:

1. be depressed

Depression is an illness and you can’t be sacked for being ill. At the same time, depressives tend to be unproductive and have a depressing effect on those around them, so it’s unlikely that anyone will want you around. It all puts you in a strong position to negotiate a nice payout. And, as an added benefit, you will almost certainly be telling the truth. But make sure you’re not so depressed you just fade away from the office like a ghost, because ghosts with no money tend to be depressed and rattle their chains for a very long time.

2. be incompetent

Enormous care is needed here: there are two obvious dangers. A spectacular act of gross incompetence will get you the sack: instant dismissal with no payout, no reference and a frantic search for another, possibly even more arduous job. Not incompetent enough and before long you’ll be getting promoted, with loads of extra hours and responsibility and even the prospect of a career. Nightmare. The key is to look like you’re trying but hopelessly out of your depth.

3. go early

The great lesson from the dot.com era is that you have to take your chances. Many a hapless fool dodged the early rounds of redundancy in the mistaken belief that greater riches lay ahead. While former colleagues loafed around the globe for six months, they worked themselves to death, only to be told that the company was bankrupt, and to walk away with nothing more than the petty cash and some stationery, which they’d been habitually stealing anyway.

4. go legal
Litigation culture gets a bad press, but it’s actually one of the better things to have been imported from America in recent years. Happily, it’s becoming increasing acceptable to sue your employer. If a colleague has ever made fun of your accent, raised their voice or, better still, pinched your bum, then you may have hit the jackpot. The key here is threaten to sue. Nobody, least of all you, wants to go through the effort and expense of actually taking someone to court. A lot of bluster, some legalese and nasty letters and before long you could be sitting down to agree an excessively generous redundancy package.

5. go corporate

Sadly, no one ever got a great payout after working in a Cornish basket weaving co-operative. The big redundancy packages go to those who spend their time fretting over spreadsheets and making the world a less interesting place. For the more pragmatic idler, you may have to undergo a year or two of this to get the deal of your dreams. It’s only in the corporate world that such improbable delights as “gardening leave” exist, in which you are paid a salary only on the condition that you don’t actually work, a bit like French farmers. Choose a sector particularly prone to downswings in the business cycle, be good, make yourself at home for a while, and then hit them with all of the above and more. Remember, once you’ve come out the other side, you may never have to go back.
…..

Then again, all that might sound like a lot of effort. Remembering that wealth is the sum of everything you value and not just things that can be measured with money (repeating this over and over as you shuffle in your pocket for some change for the bus sometimes helps), you might be better off just resigning. If your job is warping your soul that much, the Cornish basket weaving co-operative might not be such a bad idea.

Want to quit your job but need a pay-off? Andy Franks has the answer

It might not be the ultimate answer, but a spot of redundancy could be just what you’re looking for. A generous payout could buy you a much-needed sabbatical from the modern world, an opportunity to nourish your soul and heal your wounds before returning to the miseries of work. With careful budgeting, a decent redundancy could give you months of idling. It may even give you the time and money you need to escape properly.
So how do you do it? Well, getting made redundant is something of an art, and great cunning is needed. It’s no good hanging around for years, fantasizing that your company will go down the tubes or get bought out by a multinational. You need to be pro-active about things. But it can be done, and enough of us have now been through it for there to be some valuable best practice that urgently needs to be shared among the idler community:

1. be depressed

Depression is an illness and you can’t be sacked for being ill. At the same time, depressives tend to be unproductive and have a depressing effect on those around them, so it’s unlikely that anyone will want you around. It all puts you in a strong position to negotiate a nice payout. And, as an added benefit, you will almost certainly be telling the truth. But make sure you’re not so depressed you just fade away from the office like a ghost, because ghosts with no money tend to be depressed and rattle their chains for a very long time.

2. be incompetent

Enormous care is needed here: there are two obvious dangers. A spectacular act of gross incompetence will get you the sack: instant dismissal with no payout, no reference and a frantic search for another, possibly even more arduous job. Not incompetent enough and before long you’ll be getting promoted, with loads of extra hours and responsibility and even the prospect of a career. Nightmare. The key is to look like you’re trying but hopelessly out of your depth.

3. go early

The great lesson from the dot.com era is that you have to take your chances. Many a hapless fool dodged the early rounds of redundancy in the mistaken belief that greater riches lay ahead. While former colleagues loafed around the globe for six months, they worked themselves to death, only to be told that the company was bankrupt, and to walk away with nothing more than the petty cash and some stationery, which they’d been habitually stealing anyway.

4. go legal
Litigation culture gets a bad press, but it’s actually one of the better things to have been imported from America in recent years. Happily, it’s becoming increasing acceptable to sue your employer. If a colleague has ever made fun of your accent, raised their voice or, better still, pinched your bum, then you may have hit the jackpot. The key here is threaten to sue. Nobody, least of all you, wants to go through the effort and expense of actually taking someone to court. A lot of bluster, some legalese and nasty letters and before long you could be sitting down to agree an excessively generous redundancy package.

5. go corporate

Sadly, no one ever got a great payout after working in a Cornish basket weaving co-operative. The big redundancy packages go to those who spend their time fretting over spreadsheets and making the world a less interesting place. For the more pragmatic idler, you may have to undergo a year or two of this to get the deal of your dreams. It’s only in the corporate world that such improbable delights as “gardening leave” exist, in which you are paid a salary only on the condition that you don’t actually work, a bit like French farmers. Choose a sector particularly prone to downswings in the business cycle, be good, make yourself at home for a while, and then hit them with all of the above and more. Remember, once you’ve come out the other side, you may never have to go back.
…..

Then again, all that might sound like a lot of effort. Remembering that wealth is the sum of everything you value and not just things that can be measured with money (repeating this over and over as you shuffle in your pocket for some change for the bus sometimes helps), you might be better off just resigning. If your job is warping your soul that much, the Cornish basket weaving co-operative might not be such a bad idea.