Muneeza Sheikh says cost-cutting terminations are targeting senior staff across industries
14 Apr 2025
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Companies are increasingly shedding senior talent through questionable means – not just to restructure but to cut severance costs. Legal professionals are not immune to this trend.
This is according to employment and labour lawyer Muneeza Sheikh, who says she increasingly sees employers manufacture misconduct claims or performance issues as a pretext to avoid paying full severance packages to long-serving executives.
She says the trend has become particularly visible in the past two years, with more employers using these tactics as deliberate cost-saving strategies.
“These are people in their late 40s or early 50s, who’ve worked at the company for 15 to 25 years,” she says, “and who, until recently, had spotless records.”
Now, more of them are being accused of sudden underperformance – usually just months before being terminated “for cause.”
From a business standpoint, it may make sense to direct resources toward current employees through bonuses or raises rather than spending large sums on people leaving the company. But, as Sheikh says, the law is clear on what grounds justify termination without severance.
“These employees work at executive levels for 15 or 25 years without incidents, and then in the six months preceding their departure, all of a sudden, there are all these allegations of misconduct or performance issues.”
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