What Redundancy Actually Means
You were told your role is redundant and you want to know if that claim is real.
Redundancy is a word employers sometimes reach for because it sounds neutral, but whether it actually applies to your situation is a factual question worth checking closely.
What It Means
A role is redundant when the business genuinely no longer needs it, whether because of falling demand, automation, restructuring, or the closure of a department or branch.
It is not enough for an employer to simply say the word. The underlying business change has to be real and provable if the reason is ever challenged.
Why It Matters To You
A dismissal dressed up as redundancy, when the real reason was something else such as a personal conflict or unwanted performance concerns, can still be challenged as an unfair dismissal.
Selection for redundancy is also expected to follow a fair, objective process, most commonly the principle of releasing the most recently hired staff first unless there is good reason to depart from it.1
How Do You Check If It Was Real
Compare your job description with what happened afterward. If someone was hired into a similar role soon after, or your tasks were simply reassigned to existing staff, that pattern is worth questioning.
Read about retrenchment for how this reason plays out once your employer formally ends your job, and about LIFO for how selection is meant to work.
If you suspect the reason was not genuine, check your 60-day window on the deadline calculator before it closes.
Telling us what your role actually involved, and whether that work continued after you left, helps us test whether the redundancy was genuine.
Common questions
How do I know if my redundancy was real?
Ask whether the function you performed genuinely stopped, moved elsewhere, or was absorbed into another role, versus whether it continued much as before under a different job title.
Is redundancy the same word as retrenchment?
They are closely related and often used together. Redundancy usually describes the underlying business reason, while retrenchment describes the act of ending employment because of it.
Sources
- Last In First Out is the conventional, objective principle for selecting employees for retrenchment, and an employer may depart from it only if it can justify doing so with sound reasons, for a genuine redundancy. Richard Wee Chambers, 5 Points on the Law of Retrenchment in Malaysia
Keep reading
Telling us what your role actually involved, and whether that work continued after you left, helps us test whether the redundancy was genuine.