Paying for something you don’t want

Paying for something you don’t want in an employment sense is otherwise known as a buyout. This is where an employer says to an employee “we value your skills so lightly, that we are willing to pay you to no longer work for us.”

On the one hand, the buyout recipient wants to feel disappointed for being so unnecessary that their employer is paying them to not show up but part of them thinks that they might be onto something. If only they could find another few companies to pay them to not work for them, they’d have a fulltime job doing nothing. Then they could call themselves a consultant.

Alas, only a small percentage of people ever become part of the elite who qualify for buyouts. They tend to hold jobs that do serve a purpose but are not so important that the earth would stop rotating on its axis if they suddenly stopped doing their jobs for a short period of time. If a CEO left their office for a few hours without telling anyone, no one would notice and business would go on as usual during that period. If a machine operator left their machine for a few hours without telling anyone, the business would certainly notice a difference right away. Oddly enough, only one of these employees normally qualifies for a buyout when the company no longer wants them and here’s a hint. It’s not the machine operator.

Buyout arrangements are fairly standard in senior executive type roles and have certainly become quite public during the period of corporate bailouts when senior executives have been turfed from their job (ie. for incompetence) and leave with a buyout or otherwise named payout often in the millions of dollars or more.

Not surprisingly people who tend to qualify for buyouts also tend to be part of the Circle of Incompetence that we talked about earlier. Some people have all the luck.

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