Microsoft says to fired workers: Keep the money
Microsoft
A few weeks after launching the first wide-scale layoffs in its history, Microsoft Corp. admits it screwed up a key part of the plan.
First Microsoft realized that an administrative glitch caused it to pay more severance than intended to some laid-off employees. The company’s response: It asked the ex-workers for the money back. There’s nothing like adding insult to injury, after getting fired than the company asking for some money back. Especially after they posted a profit the financial quarter you got fired.
But when one of Microsoft’s letters seeking repayment surfaced on the Web on Saturday, the situation turned embarrassing. On Monday, the company reversed course and said the laid-off workers could keep the extra payouts. It’s not as if the severance overages were in the millions, I’m guessing. Although, it is mighty big of Microsoft to let the fired empoyees keep the extra money.
The glitch was purported to be a clerical error, and that at some point in the process of calculating severance packages, communicating with employees and cutting checks, “we had payments misaligned with people’s names.” (It is unknown if an excel spreadsheet was at the root of the problem.)
With the recession biting into sales of Microsoft’s core Office and Windows software, the company said in January it would let up to 5,000 of its 94,000 employees go, the only mass layoff in its 34-year history. Microsoft remains profitable, however, and has a cash hoard of nearly $21 billion.
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