He ran redundancies for his employer, then it made him redundant and he sued
An HR lead who cast his redundancy as payback lost every claim, Tribunal Magistrate Jared Kang Chern Wey ruled on 1 July 2026.
The dispute reached Singapore's Employment Claims Tribunals after the employee brought two linked claims against the company that had let him go. He had joined as HR lead in late 2022 and was made redundant just over two years later, in a process he himself would ordinarily have run.
His central claim was that the redundancy was retaliation. Between 1 and 5 August 2024, he had escalated management's proposed mid-year pay and share-option adjustments to the group's rewards team, which advised deferring them. He said that escalation was a protected disclosure, and that within two months he was told his role was "at risk of redundancy" and then given notice.
The tribunal rejected that reading. On the record, the August emails showed the employee doing his job as the conduit between management and the rewards team, not blowing the whistle on wrongdoing. The chronology also did not fit: the company's redundancy business case was dated 23 September, and the "at risk" letter was issued on 9 October, both before the employee filed his formal Speak Up report on 10 October. The tribunal was not persuaded that any retaliatory motive operated on the decision.
The employee also argued the redundancy was a sham because HR work continued after he left. The tribunal disagreed, accepting the company's account that the role was being reshaped around change-management skills he did not have, with routine work absorbed by others.
On the money, the employee said the company's own redundancy materials promised one month's salary per year of service, so he was owed roughly eight weeks rather than the four weeks, about $16,600, he received. That failed too. The tribunal found no statutory right to a retrenchment benefit and no contractual one: the "Redundancy Standard" he relied on stated on its face that "this standard is non-contractual", and no clause in his contract imported it. Past generosity in an earlier exercise did not create a binding promise. "Usage, however consistent, is not self-executing", the tribunal held.
His final claim, for the first tranche of share options due to vest on his last day, also failed. His contract and the plan rules gave the company absolute discretion over vesting once notice had been served, and it had exercised that discretion by withholding all variable pay for 2024. The tribunal's role was limited to checking for irrationality or bad faith, and the employee proved neither.
Yet the company did not walk away clean. It asked for costs and was refused. The tribunal noted the company had not disputed that it missed the statutory deadline for notifying the Ministry of Manpower of the redundancy, and it had reservations about how a senior HR professional handled the exit: a promised list of alternative roles was never sent, and the employee's email access was restricted while he was still employed.
The tribunal was careful to draw a line, stating that "these are criticisms of managerial practice, not findings of legal impropriety". The judgment makes clear that the redundancy was genuine and each of the employee's claims failed, yet the same missed notification and unsent list of alternative roles were why the company, despite winning, recovered none of its costs.
