Voluntary redundancy plan in France - Update

IBM announced in early May a voluntary redundancy plan in France for up to 1251 people.

We just learned that out of ~4900 employees, 2513 (more than half) asked for extra information and 1547 filed a complete and valid application, which required you to have a job project following employment at IBM (ready to go on retirement, job offer from another company, or mature business creation project). Ironically, since there are only 1251 positions in the plan, 300 employees with a clear project to leave will have to stay for the time being. This says a lot about IBM's attractiveness as an employer.

These 1251 employees (25% of the workforce) will leave for the most part on July 1st and August 1st.

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Layoffs/separations will continue through at least the end of 1Q 2022...
After that hopefully, this company will start to be somewhat stable... we can all dream!!

It is not a law, more of an agreement between IBM and the French state (DRIEETS). To keep things short, risking increasing the number of jobless people would put IBM in very bad standing with the public sector. What's crazy is that almost 1/3 of current employees have a solid plan to do something else.

Another thing to know is that unemployment insurance is mandatory in France and quite expensive (4.2% of your gross income), but you can only get the benefits if you've been fired or left in mutual agreement with your employer, not if you resign. So almost no one ever resigns. Most companies agree to sign a mutual agreement when an employee wants to leave (by law, they must pay ~one week of salary for every year the employee spent at the company), but IBM has an absurd policy of refusing these agreements when an employee wants to leave, so many people just slack off until IBM fires them... This is crazy!

Why did they require that you have a job offer or retire? Is there a French law to that effect?

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Voluntary redundancy plan in France - Update

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