Facebook user Kum Weng Lai recently shared a story on how his good friend got retrenched from a European bank and she was replaced by a caucasion FT from the home country of her bank.
Here is the full story.
One of my good friends was recently retrenched by a European bank that she has worked for more then a decade. She is local born S’porean in her late 50s. She was a member of their senior team and is very capable and hardworking, and has many years of experience in her job. Her replacement was a Caucasian FT from the home country of her bank. As far as she knows, her work was exemplary, and she had no bad marks against her. Her employer simply did not need to give her a reason to justify her lay off, other then to give her the severance pay, which is not a lot.
Apparently, her replacement was younger and was employed in their home country. Because they were going through a round of lay offs in their home office, they decided to send this chap to S’pore to take over her job. The reason is that in their home country, there are real protections for workers. Its expensive for them to lay people off in their home countries due to minimum severance pay, unemployment benefits, maintenance of health benefits for a certain period, paying out of accumulated sick hours, etc. Also, the staff can appeal to a govt body if they feel the layoff is unjustified and also sometimes, if they belong to a union, the union will fight tooth and nail for them.
So, rather then go through this expensive process to lay off the staff in their home country, they just assign this guy to S’pore and instead lay my friend off because the govt and unions here do not have this same protection. This way, the foreign guy is still employed by them and they save money from the home office by avoiding the need to retrench him. My friend pays the price. Have you all heard of other such situations?
