Holiday season firings are some bullshyt no matter what company it is.
I’m a corporate lawyer at a Magic Circle law firm. We deal with multinational, billion-pound companies. UK law stipulates that if a company wants to make more than 20 people redundant at once they have to go through a collective consultation process to ensure that everyone knows why their role is up for redundancy and how they’ve been selected.
As part of that process lots of companies provide money for each affected employee to get an hour’s legal advice, on them, as to what recourse they have, if any. The allowance that global companies provide for that hour is very generous, and as my firm is arguably the most prestigious in the country we get a lot of business that way.
I’ve been in dozens of these meetings with employees that are in tears at the possibility of not having a job in a month’s time, even with generous severance pay. That emotion is the same regardless of whether it’s done in January, March, June, October or December.
There’s always a reason why this shyt happens when it does - whether it’s for year-end results, quarterly results or whatever isn’t for me to say, as I’m a corporate lawyer, not an accountant, and my opinion on that would be worthless.
No company is going to choose to let multiple people go at once without a solid business reason behind it. It sounds harsh, but that’s life. If they’re not let go in December they’d be let go in January. At the end of the day all that matters is the numbers.