Buyout/severance question

just playing devil's advocate here but since a severance package or buyout offer isn't required by law, why would you have any grounds to sue when you didn't like the offer?

 

It should count if you are transferred. If you leave voluntarily, no dice.

 

I'm surprised some prick on here hasn't said something about how "This is what you get when you become a two-newspaper employee couple."

(Wait, someone just did.)

The way this business is going, a 50 percent survival rate probably is the best you can hope for.

Nothing personal, Sobe, but I never trusted the package-deal people anyway, once they start moving to new papers. You hang out, sleep with and marry someone you work with now, sure, I get how that happens. But once they start changing jobs, they'd better deal with the consequences. I never believed that the second vacancy at a shop was being filled, lo and behold, by "the best person available." It generally was filled by the "best spouse available" because some manager wanted to hire the other half of the couple. Happens in precious few industries, and way too quaint and cozy for one in crisis like this one.

 

The only reason you believe this, IIRC, is because you wouldn't "allow" your wife to work as a sportswriter in the event that she encounter "foul-mouthed athletes."

 

Good memory, wrong order. ;D

I wouldn't want a sportswriter to be my wife, not the other way around. Besides, there is a little extra continued-employment insurance these days in journalists not being married to journalists. Journalists being married to former-journalists-turned-barristas soon will be all the rage, followed quickly enough by former-journalists-turned-barristas married to former-journalists-turned-barristas

 

It sounds like when she switched papers, McClatchy didn't own KR. They bought KR after you switched papers, correct?

There's no way you can add her service time after the fact.

 

Exactly the way I read it too.

They didn't get swallowed up by McClatchy. They left K-R to go to a McC paper.

Only way you would get credit for all the time is if you were with the K-R paper when McC bought it. When you left the K-R, it was still a separate entity.

 

Wait a minute. When McClatchy bought KR, it took on everything associated with it -- from the debt to the dusty personnel files in Storage Room B.

Another example: A KR employee is sexually harassed. The employee leaves KR for McClatchy. A month later, McClatchy buys KR. Employee is laid off. By the logic some of us are using, employee has no one to sue. That's ridiculous.

When you buy a company, you can't be accountable for some things associated with it and not others. McClatchy bought KR's history, not just the buildings and the presses and the trucks.

Talk to a labor lawyer, I say. If he or she is willing to take a percentage or a win-only cut, more power to you.

 

If I go from Comany B to Company C, I start from scratch, right? I know that going in and I don't have any negotiating power, right?

If, years later, Company C buys Company B, I don't suddenly get the PTO of a 6-year veteran. If I took a paycut to join Company C, I don't get my salary from Company B.

 

Exactly, a_r. I don't know how easier to explain it than you just did. And I'm sure a labor lawyer would likely see it the same way too.