[dagw]

Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated?

Isn't that every day at a job in an At-Will state in the US?

Also if you quit of your own volition while the unions are negotiating you get nothing. If you wait until the unions are done negotiating and get laid off you get several month of severance pay. In fact quitting while layoffs are being discussed has to be among the dumbest financial decision you can make.

[speed_spread]

> quitting while layoffs are being discussed has to be among the dumbest financial decision

I understand how one would want to stick around not to miss out on a juicy package but this seems counter productive for the employer, the employees and society in general. I can assume that the productivity impact is non negligible, with many workers sitting on their ass waiting to be laid off. Conversely, some workers might have immediate opportunities elsewhere which they can't take for fear of losing out on the bonanza. Finally, If everybody hits the job market at once when it's done there's more chance that the package money is going to get spent just looking for another job.

There really should be a fair retroactive + proportional compensation mechanism for people leaving on their own during the "negotiation" period.

[contrarian1234]

This is generally speaking not a problem. It's technically possible, but generally in at-will states in the US, for exactly that reason, there is a strong incentive to not "randomly" lay people off b/c the company gets a reputation for being unpredictable and people don't feel secure in their jobs. They start to view their jobs are more transitory and it erodes company loyalty

Most companies will intentionally avoid doing layoffs and only do them in these large batches when there are financial necessary (like the tech sector layoffs we saw recently). Only "shitty" companies lay off people randomly to balance/adjust the books