South Africa now has its own retrenchment portal. It's a sign of the times.
The site, www.goldenhandshake.co.za, launched in May, in response to an increase in companies streamlining, down-scaling, outsourcing, merging and simply going bust.
It offers the retrenched legal, psychological and financial help.
But the builders of the portal, the Virtual Services Group, say that
whereas retrenchment was once an occasional, shameful event
associated with the stigma of being fired, today it has much less
damning connotations.
On goldenhandshake, therefore, you will not only find advice on how
to get back on your feet via the job route - by writing a CV and
preparing for an interview - but also on how to start a new life,
either in your own business or by offering your services to companies
looking to outsource.
Partners in the site include Metropolitan, the life assurer;
Psymetric, which offers psychological help on career changes; Chart, which assists companies with retrenchment programmes; Santam, the
short-term insurer; Aldes, the business brokers; Murphy Wallace
Slabbert Inc, the attorneys; DAV, the employment specialists; Ernst &
Young, the tax experts; Cybastaff, an online employment agency;
YourHealth, a website dedicated to information about health; and
Advisors Online, the online brokers.
As you might expect with Metropolitan's participation, in the section dealing with finance there are invitations aplenty to buy
Metropolitan products. Don't be put off - there are pages of useful
advice, too, some written specially for the site and the rest drawn
from other publications.
There are, for example, sections about your financial situation after
retrenchment. Here you will find advice on structuring your
retrenchment package to include continued medical scheme membership, for example, or to take into account that you may already be close to retirement.
There is also a detailed explanation of your options when you receive
your pension or provident fund payout.
Calculators can be a boon in times of doubt. Goldenhandshake offers
one that will help you work out your monthly expenses and another
that will figure out how much you need to retire. Unfortunately, the
latter has to be fed a fair bit of info - such as the expected value
of your investments when you retire and the expected value of your
pension - before it will deliver.
The tax section has two particularly nifty calculators. One will work
out what lump sum you can take tax free when you retire, and the
other what lump sum you can take tax free on retrenchment.
The short-term insurance section, sponsored by Santam, has tips on
reducing your insurance expenses while you ride out the financial
crisis of retrenchment.
Since early retirement and retrenchment often have much in common, part of the portal is dedicated to retirement. But its subsections - endowments, preservation funds, foreign investments, unit trusts,
retirement annuities, medical aid and group life benefits, - are
sometimes a bit thin on info. Often they amount to just an
explanation and a Metropolitan product offer.
But the Virtual Services Group has promised to expand the site, and
perhaps this is an area they will focus on.
One section of the site that is well stocked is the one that focuses
on law and retrenchment. Here articles have been supplied by
attorneys Murphy Wallace Slabbert Inc and the Department of Labour on topics such as what constitutes unfair dismissal, what you should
expect from a lawyer, how to approach the Council for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, and how to take your case to the labour court.
As with many portals, this one has its faults: for instance, "news"
articles date back to last year, while other contributions are not
dated, so you can't be sure how up-to-date the information is.
Some articles seem downright irrelevant. But the usefulness of a
single site offering so much support to those who suddenly find
themselves out on a precarious limb, will doubtless override these
small criticisms.
This article was first published in the Fourth Quarter 2001 edition of Personal Finance magazine
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