Comment by _heimdall
3 hours ago
Unless something has changed drastically since I worked at MS, they absolutely can do mass layoffs without having to buy out contracts.
Sure they offer severance, industry norm is usually 1-2 weeks of severence per year of employment, but in no way are they contractually limited to only lay people off for cause.
Firing an individual is different, on that front they are careful how its handled to avoid being sued and having to settle. Employment laws also vary by country, I'm mostly familiar with US laws.
Yeah that would make sense. If they state in their contract that they're free to terminate you in exchange for what they're offering now then that would explain what they're offering now.
What I was responding to is somebody above thinking that Microsoft was being "generous" with this deal - what I was saying is that they were almost certainly just sticking to greediest possible behavior that stays within the bounds of the contract. You can describe billion dollar multinational corps in quite a lot of ways, but generous isn't one of them.