OK, here’s where the fun starts.
Imagine this: You just finished a meeting with a group of very dissatisfied ex senior managers of your company. They’ve been laid off with you and not only has the company NOT PAID the severance package within 7 days, they finally pay out end of the month and you get a lot lesser than what you think. What the hey!
Well, let’s go through this step by step.
Step 1
Let’s bring out the rule books. The employer has the right to defend themselves so here’s the playing field. The Employment contract. Yep, the one you signed those long years ago. Under the contract, there should be a section for Termination. What’s important in there is:
a) Your notice period or severance payment (usually one month to 3 months)
b) The conditions of termination
Step 2
Additional Rules, namely your country rules. You need to know what your rights are as an employee, so you need to do a little searching. It’s easy with the internet, for instance for Malaysia it’s
- ten days’ wages for each completed year of service of less than two years;
- 15 days’ wages for each year of two to five years’ service; and
- 20 days’ wages for each year of service exceeding five years
So, for instance you finish 13 months, you’ll get a prorated number. It would be 10 days + (10/12)= 10.83. I.e it would be 0.83 days for any months before you hit the second year. Once the second year arrives, calculation would be (15/12=1.25) for each month and so on. So if you have 34 months, it would be 2 years and 10 months. So
(2 x 15) + (10 x 1.25) = 42.5
Those are your days. Remember it.
As I said, the internet is your friend. You can check your country here at this link.
If it ain’t there, search some more. I bet if we spend more time, we can find the severance payment for guys in Timbuktu.
Step 3
Next, you get paid daily for whatever days you’ve worked for in a month. For instance if they sack you on the 8th, you get 7 days wages. We’ll get to daily wages calculation later.
Step 4
Annual Leave Pay. This is nice. If you are a workaholic, you are rewarded because the company is obligated to pay for the annual leave accrued and not taken. So if you have like 200 days of annual leave (which many company will limit these days), you go back a millionaire. Or at least a whole lot richer. Companies hedge themselves by limiting the number of leaves you can take forward or maximum number of leaves per year an employee can have.
Step 5
Any other reimbursements will be stock option participation etc.
OK. Now you have it all listed out, you have at least an idea what you should be expecting. The playing field is set.
