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I was laid off in Sweden by an American parent company and all work ended the second it happened. It was funny because they could have asked me to keep working,

• tialaramex 3y ago
  Garden Leave (sometimes "Gardening Leave") is the technical term for this. You get paid, and they might insist on you not taking up any new job until the contract term ends, but they explicitly do not want you to do any work or come to the office or anything like that. There's a parallel and equally wasteful but popular practice of insisting on taking on CxO employees of a purchased outfit for some prolonged period, perhaps as insurance, except that you've got no useful or interesting work for them to do. Unlike Garden Leave they're not fired - one of my friends was even told they could expect a substantial pay raise, but the job is now awful so their goal will be to wait only until as many options/ bonuses/ etc. as possible have irreversibly turned into hard money and then quit ASAP. It's like OK, I could do something actually interesting next week or, I could sit in tedious meetings with idiots for 24 months, then pay off my mortgage, and retire immediately with $$$$$. Ugh. If you know you'll be dead in a year, obviously the former is the right choice. But you probably won't be.