Motorola Confirms China Layoffs, Reaches Deal with Protesting Staff

Rumors have been swirling of major Motorola layoffs for a while now, and they exploded into protests last week when Motorola Mobility/Google employees across China took to the streets to protest “illegal firings.” Now, according to QQ Tech, Motorola says that it has reached a deal with the laid-off staff (who number 700 in Beijing) that’s apparently so good 90 percent of them chose to resign voluntarily.

There are still a few holdouts (apparently mostly longtime employees concerned about pension arrangements), but the prospects for those laid off are pretty good. Motorola is offering them a severance package that sounds pretty sweet. Everyone will get their salary paid through September 20, and then a severance package that is calculated according to this formula:

Years at the company x (average monthly salary x 3) + 2 months’ salary

Apparently Motorola’s average monthly salary is about 4,500 RMB ($714), which means that someone who had been with the company for three years on that salary would receive 49,500 RMB ($7,857), or the equivalent of nearly a full year’s salary. Employees will also be compensated at a rate of 300 percent of their daily pay rate for vacation days they’ve lost, and the company will continue to pay housing stipends through September 20th.

Employee protests last week

That all sounds like a pretty good deal, but according to the Marbridge Daily, Motorola employees have also been receiving offers from competing tech companies from Lenovo to Xiaomi, so it sounds like between that and the large severance, most folks are probably going to land on their feet. That’s good news, and it’s good that Google and Motorola ended up giving them a pretty good deal, although it’s a shame it apparently took public protests to make that happen.

[QQ Tech via Marbridge Daily]