Originally posted by BL21DE3
Lucky ****ing git! We were all made redundant last week thanks to the company going into receivership (another case of directors being utter wankers). We'd love to get redundancy packages, especially £300,000 ones, but no such luck here as most of us hadn't worked with the company for more than two years. So we'll have to wrangle with the DTI to get what wages we're owed and they have a lovely limit of £260 according to their little booklet.
Sorry to hear about that. Your situation sounds the like the one I was in a few years ago when the company I'd only been working for for 6 months decided to call in the receivers. The company started out 2 years prior to the commencement of my employment, they were a small software house (about 20 employees at the time I joined), and only had one software package on the market which was doing OK but they were only just breaking even. A lot of R&D effort had gone into a new product they were about to launch at the time I joined, and they were on the look out for a venture capital deal to get the necessary funding to bring the software package to market. Well in the end it turned out that a lot of the real financial information about the state of the company's finances was being kept hidden from the vast majority of employees (possibly a cover up from the company's parent company in the US who are still in business to this day AFAIK). In the end the company was wound up owing lots of money to various parties. Now, what I find completely wrong about these types of scenarios is that the Inland Revenue/taxman gets priority over all other debters. Then, after all the relevant outstanding debts have been claimed by The Revenue, the company's other debters are given a shout of what's left, if anything, and then very finally the employees (again assuming there's anything in the pot that's been left over). If there's nothing left to liquidate, then the employees get bugger all
! Yes, the DTI can help but as has been pointed out there is an upper limit, and boy do they take a long time to pay out. I was made redundant from that company in November and didn't get the payout from the DTI until about March/April the following year - it was well short of the actual amount owed to me in wages by the company though. The limited status of the company meant that there wasn't really a lot that any of us ordinary folk could do, save for personally taking one of the company directors to court, but at what cost.
Oh, and on the keys across the MD's car, I really wish I had done that at another company I worked for where the entire of the department I was working in were made redundant due to a major client terminating their contract and our jobs being outsourced. The client terminated their contract on Wednesday, there was a hush-hush meeting on Thursday which non of us knew about until Friday morning, and then on that Friday morning we were all invited one by one to attend a private one-on-one meeting with our department manager in his office where we were invidually told of our dismissal/redundancy and instantly marched off the premises afterwards (collecting stuff from our desk as we went) before the next person came up before the firing squad. He (the MD) use to park his car in his own reserved parking space in the cark park almost right next to the front entrance. :inferno:
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