My boss was getting fired so he tricked the company into giving his team a year off with pay.

Here's a story from a while ago with malicious compliance on the part of my manager.

It was just around the year 2000 and I was working in IT.

There had been a busy year leading up to the millennium.

Now everyone was looking to get back to normal.

The company had other plans for us and decided to make a third of the IT staff redundant.

In my team of 12, this meant four of us.

This wasn't really a problem as even though I had just moved into the IT a few years earlier,

the job market was booming and getting a new job would be easy.

This HR move had been a bit of a surprise as we were very busy.

Lots of routine projects had been put on hold, so lots of catching up.

But whatever, they knew best.

Redundancy with this company offered a month's salary per year of service.

Way over a legal minimum.

They were offering for me a year's salary tax-free, mostly.

To find a better paying job elsewhere, an offer that would be hard to say no to,

but unfortunately, they were not going to ask.

The way redundancy works for the company in the UK is that all the occupants of the role

are ranked by very carefully selected criteria and the lowest ranked members are gone.

The way the criteria are selected are to make them very subjective and capable of

withstanding any legal challenge that might lead to an industrial tribunal.

If there was one thing HR hated above all, it was legal hassles.

...