This is the single most misunderstood part of Jamaican employment law: severance pay is not owed every time someone loses a job. It is owed when the job is made redundant.
The distinction that matters
If you are dismissed for misconduct or poor performance, no redundancy payment arises. What you are owed is notice, unpaid salary and accrued holiday pay.
If your position ceases to exist — the business closes, the department is restructured, the role is no longer needed — that is redundancy, and the Employment (Termination and Redundancy Payments) Act applies.
How much
- Two weeks pay for each year of the first ten years of service
- Three weeks pay for each year after that
So someone with fifteen years gets twenty weeks for the first ten and fifteen weeks for the remaining five.
The qualifying period
To qualify, you must have worked at least 104 weeks — two calendar years — of continuous, uninterrupted service.
That threshold catches people out. Someone made redundant at twenty-two months of service does not qualify, even though the redundancy is genuine.
Notice is separate
Redundancy payment does not replace notice. You are entitled to both.
If your employer calls it something else
What matters is the substance, not the label. If the post is gone and no one replaces you, that is redundancy regardless of what the letter says.
If you believe a redundancy has been dressed up as a dismissal to avoid payment, you can take it to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.
Fixed-term contracts
Where a fixed-term contract simply runs to its end date, the employer is not obliged to give notice of termination. But if you keep working more than four weeks past expiry, notice periods apply again.