The 2 months is pretty standard for white collar corporate mass layoffs to cover the 60 day WARN notice requirement, since most corps just opt to sever people immediately and pay out the required notice period. For blue collar work it's typically more usual to make them work thru the notice period and offer retention bonuses.
Grading exit packages on a curve instead of what workers deserve only carries water for Dell and sets an ever lower bar for every subsequent round of layoffs.
Okay, how should it be graded? What's preventing me for arbitrarily choosing a number like 100 months? Averages might not be perfect, but at least everyone can agree on it.
You can choose 100 months then advocate your position on its merits, if you like. This is a political question, a contest of power and resources, not a math problem. Scaling severance to be proportionate to the average period of unemployment at the time of firing would ensure the company doing the layoff would bear their share of the societal burden of unemployment they are helping to create.
>You can choose 100 months then advocate your position on its merits, if you like
You certainly didn't bother to do that, and "2 months is generous because it's above average" might be a lazy argument and perpetuates the status quo, but it's certainly orders of magnitude better than no argument.
Your system of averaging employer input means that exclusively employers comprise a virtual senate for all matters severance and the corresponding employment they create.
Any proposal that considers opinion and interests beyond businesses’ is already more even handed than your proposal.
When I got laid off from GE I received a severance and bonus. They trained me on how to apply for unemployment so that my severance wasn't calculated. So I got unemployment and was able to bank my entire severance. If you follow the instructions without the help of legal advice your unemployment starts when the severance runs out.
The way I see it, if you want something fair it can't be solely the worker nor solely the employer.
And the governement would be too easy to be pushed too far one way or the other, depending on political climate.
Which is why unions should be pushed more, so employers and employee can negotiate than on equal terms (and not employer versus single employee).
Not american, and that's how it is here, and frankly it's not perfect but it seems a lot better than hope your employer has some decency to give you breadcrumbs and if not oh well tough luck.
Can you recommend any companies I can apply to with an option to “opt” for just-cause employment? Would be very impressed if you could list any companies offering “just-cause” employment with >=12,500 employees that these laid-off employees could have “opted” for.
Or does that not exist?
At first glance, it seems equivalent to “well, they opted to work on planet Earth”, with the implication that they could have opted to work on the moon or Mars or the ISS - as in, for the most part those options don’t actually exist, and where they do, there are a very limited number of jobs available (on the ISS), so that in fact not all of the 12,500 people could have opted to work there.
2 months is already way above "average" and adding weeks per year is ... nice.