I went through a similar thing at Amazon. Locked out of my laptop at 3 a.m. and emailed I was laid off. The key thing though is that my official end date was 90 days in the future. Legally, the 3 a.m. lock out was actually just a warning of impending layoffs. I got paid to “work from home” for 3 months after I returned my badge and laptop.
My understanding is that Europe may have longer wait periods, but most tech companies still essentially do the same thing there. Amazon’s laid off Berlin employees still get locked out at 3am and told to do nothing for months while legal does whatever it needs to do to get rid of them.
But you can be placed in a room/office with no windows (not the OS), a computer without internet access and nothing to do. How long can you go on like that?
The law, sadly, can't forbid asshole employers.
Was a battle of wills and eventually after 5 weeks of coming into a random branch office and sitting in an empty room, we came in one Friday to be told that the manager in charge of the building closure had been removed from the project and they would be paying full redundancy pay and we didn’t have to come back in but they’d pay for the next 3 months as well.
Fun as a 21 year old.
yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.
Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.