International Cutbacks and Reductions-in-Force in the Global Pandemic

With the global pandemic impacting the world’s economies, employers everywhere are facing a unique crisis: reconciling significant revenue drop-offs with high payrolls and locked-down, dormant workforces. Employers in the U.S. have been reminded how difficult and regulated reductions-in-force and workplace cutbacks can be, though workforce retrenchments tend to be even more complex and regulated abroad, where legal systems do not offer employment-at-will, but impose complex severance pay and notice requirements – and feature high rates of organized-labor penetration.

This program will offer strategies and “how-to” approaches for multinationals facing a possible cross-border workforce cutback or retrenchment.

Our panel of international employment lawyers, members of Littler’s COVID-19 Task Force, will cover the following topics:

• Emerging practices among – and options available to – multinational headquarters facing global cutbacks and retrenchments
• Cross-border legal hurdles for each of the most common payroll-reduction strategies including RIF; pay rate cut; pay deferral; hours cut and furlough
• How to get overseas governments to pay your existing workers for lost hours and pay by leveraging the new overseas “wage subsidies” and special/partial unemployment benefit programs
• How to project-manage a complex multijurisdictional retrenchment from your global headquarters