How some retiring staff beat Standard at its own game

As focus shifts to the next phase of Standard Group’s staff rationalisation, it is emerging that some of the employees who took up the voluntary early retirement may have been tipped off about their impending lay-off and pulled the rug from under their employer’s feet.

The management is now coming to terms with the prospect of paying out millions of shillings especially to those who have worked for the media house for many years. “The sacking list was leaked to some,” someone familiar with the HR office at Standard said. “If you look at those who applied for early retirement, you will see that some would not have opted for it if they didn’t have information that they had been targeted for the chop.”

With such revelations, the employees appear to have beaten the management at its own game by cashing in on opportunity that offers them better compensation and less pain.  Summary dismissal would have denied the victims any form of compensation, except perhaps in leu of notice. “People who would have gone home empty-handed will walk away millionaires,” said the source.

Meanwhile, our investigations reveal that Standard management is not all dump. It is also playing clever with its maths by looking for the cheapest way to offload other staff. Standard newspaper daily Deputy Managing Editor Peter Okong’o, who had applied for early retirement, had his contract not renewed instead, according to a highly-placed source.

Mr Okong’o’s contract was expiring on July 31, but he applied within the grace period for early retirement. The management appears to have figured out that retiring him early would have cost them an arm and thus decided not to renew his contract.

In the same fashion, the company rejected early retirement applications from a number of long-serving staff, including Sports Editor Omulo Okoth, Associate Editor Susan Kasera, Business Editor Hussein Mohamed and photographer Jacob Otieno, among others. It would have been more expensive to compensate them for early retirement and the management chose to let them stay on until they hit retirement age.

The source said one member of this group would have walked away with Ksh12 million had the early retirement option gone through, almost double what full retirement will pay.

SEE ALSO: LIST OF THOSE WHO OPTED TO RETIRE