Severence and immediately taking a job in a company in the same group

bmount

Registered User
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My wife has been made redundant, it was expected, and there
is a modest 8 year severence package.

The company she is leaving has transferred all its remaining employees to another company in an outsourcing arrangement and there was no specific role for her.

This company however has multiple subsidiaries and after a short job search
coincidentally has been called for interview by one of those subsidiaries next Monday.

The question is, is this permitted and could she lose her severence package if they found out ?
I heard something about the job description must be different and a gap of 1 month is required.

Hope this makes sense.

Personally I don't think its an issue at all because the outsourcing parent company didnt have a role for her during the transfer of employees, but putting it here on this forum just in case anybody has encountered "re-joining" the same company type situations straight after redundancy.
 
It's usually prohibited for at least X months, there was a recent thread where it was 18 months! I thin 6-12 months is typical.
 
How tightly bound are the subsidiaries to the parent? Are they separate entities?
 
well you have me there, I would have to find this out. What defines tightly bound please ?

Any other advice in the meantime most welcome....
 
It may depend on the outsourcing agreement that is in place and whether or not the new employer has had any restrictions imposed on it. It looks like the subsidiary doesn't see an issue with it and to be honest, once the money is in her bank account for her severance package, what can her old employers do about it anyway?. She obviously will still have a duty of confidentiality to her old employer but I am aware of a similar case happening involving a bank and an IT outsourcer and no-one batted an eye-lid. It's not an issue until she gets a job offer anyway and at that stage, you can always run it by an employment solicitor for advise
 
The query seems to relate to tax/legal restrictions rather than company level restrictions.

I don't believe that such a restriction exists. I advised on a redundancy programme in '09 and someone reapplied for another role and it was fine. It just can't be contrived.
 
Thank you to all for your different advice, I'm beginning to think similar to @thedaddyman this is not an issue and that its up to the prospective employers to realise any restrictions (i.e its not up to my wife to discover who can obviously say "well look I'm just looking for a job, I didn't know there a possible issue, why am I being interviewed" so to speak) and then as long as none of this has the remotest chance of stopping the severence payment which is due in around 3 weeks time, then this should work out ok.
 
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