I have no doubt that it happens, there are conditions in which rare employment circumstances come up. But I am interested in the frequency - how common is this?
So if you hire, supervise, or otherwise determine the status of employees, let me know how frequently you have had someone ask you to be laid off.
It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this poll the reason they’ve asked to be laid off, but I would be curious - I imagine the most common reasons would be that there’s some stressor in their life - maybe a sick relative, a move where their spouse got a job in another area, but they haven’t got a job yet… maybe turmoil in their family life.
On the one hand, being laid off is advantageous over being fired, it can be a way to get rid of an employee without giving them the stigma of a firing so they can hopefully find another job more easily. On the other hand, it is expensive to the employer in that the worker gets unemployment benefits (partially paid by the employer in my state - I don’t know about yours) and it can be expensive to more frequently search for replacement workers, whenever the layoff is not related to layoffs currently planned by management (I’ve never actually worked anywhere where layoffs occurred without a general downsizing, but I assume somewhere such things do happen.)
Even if you don’t supervise or hire other employees, feel free to share in the thread - you must have some idea of how many of your fellow employees have asked to be laid off when layoffs happen.
When I worked in construction, the hiring/layoff cycle happened every year. Some people would ask to be laid off early and some people would ask to be kept on as long as possible (and these guys would often come together - e.g., a father offers to be let go early as long as we’d keep his son on as long as we could), but most people would just work until there wasn’t any work for them to do.
I’m in the California so maybe it’s more typical here. I can think of three separate occasions where someone asked me for a voluntary layoff when the company was about to begin layoffs. I have also offered up myself to be laid off under similar circumstances. In all of our cases, the stated reason was loosely “the relative ease of replacing the job vs the others”
Company 1. Medical Supply (I was the office manager) the decision was made to lay off two people. Myself and a salesman offered up our positions. In his case, he could sell ice to an Eskimo. Me, I just didn’t really like my boss much and knew I could get another job easily.
Company 2. Maintenance Facility (me: Regional Director) When the company was planning to lay people off two people left to start their own.
Currently I supervise (me: one of the founders) 8-15 people depending on how you’re keeping count and how you define supervise. But it’s never happened here, if anything I’ll be giving raises in a few weeks.
Actually, I think three or four times we wanted to get rid of someone who we basically liked, but wasn’t up to the job. We wanted to give them the chance for unemployment.
I have never seen this happen, but I’ve only had about 20 employees over the years and never more than 5 at a time.
The closest I’ve seen was a college kid who was fired for not showing up to work (two lates and two no-shows), who then argued that we fired him because he was Muslim and then, when we sent the campus work-study program a copy of the employee handbook and records of his attendance, asked that we just report that he quit. Because, after all, he was going to quit anyway. Yeah right kid, because I really want to help inflict you on another employer.
I assume you are not counting voluntary termination programs. During the AT&T trivestiture we got an excellent package to voluntarily leave - and about 30% of our center took it. It was quite a retirement party! I did also, since I had a job lined up and I made a bundle.
I told my boss that if there is a layoff program I’d take it, since I’m close enough to retirement that the money I’d get would make it worth it, and this would protect those who were younger. I don’t think he’ll do it, in any case no layoffs are on the horizon.
In my industry layoffs come with some payment package, so I don’t see them offering it for people just wanting to quit. I’ve never seen anyone volunteering out of the blue. I did layoff someone who was probably going to get fired, but that was not on a request.
It differs industry to industry, which is why a common complaint about the unemployment insurance system is that it takes and gives from industries unfairly. Everyone pays in, and you do pay in more if you have frequent layoffs. But I recall reading an analysis that said the companies who layoff annually like construction unions benefit from the system more than they pay in.
Local 7 Ironworkers in Boston get around $35 an hour. That’s $1400 a week for a dirty, dangerous job.
MA pays out $674 per week in unemployment. That’s an attractive offer. You get to make half as much as you usually do without having to work. Plus, you can always work off the books while you collect. Get a job painting or doing construction or something and get paid under the table.
I knew one was coming. They were ALWAYS coming. I was safe though. I had survived the last 15, so I thought I could survive another. But I didn’t want to. My commute was 140 miles round trip, rush hour both ways on a 12 hour shift. I couldn’t do it anymore.
I told the director he could put me on the list, or I would have to leave soon after and gave him my reasons.
Man, I’m not usually the jealous type, but that makes me jealous. In California, not generally known as a stingy state, my unemployment was less even though my salary had been quite a bit more. So unemployment was only about 17% of my previous salary. It was peanuts.
In both the companies where I have been a senior enough manager to be aware of this, RIF exercises were declared to be off-limits to volunteers.
We did/do offer voluntary early retirement packages to broad classes of long tenured, 55+. employees. If that counts, I know of half a dozen people who have taken up these offers. In the last round of packages offered, only one out of over 100 eligible employees took up the offer. She was 62 and her husband had cancer. Some of the others were in fact laid off soon after, with much gnashing of teeth over getting a significantly worse severance package.
When I used to be in construction it happened all the time as the year wound down. Out of say 100 roofers, each year maybe 20 would ask to be laid off versus just getting a few hours here and there.