redundancy
noun · betriebsbedingte Kündigung
Betriebsbedingte Kündigung for redundancy, but the German version takes the choice of person out of the employer’s hands, § 1 Abs. 3 KSchG forces a Sozialauswahl among comparable employees by tenure, age, maintenance duties and disability, and a wrong selection makes the dismissal void. Redundanz is not the legal word, it is a false friend from engineering and IT.
Which translation, when
Why
Redundancy in the UK lets the employer define the pool and pick within it on fair criteria, and German law replaces that discretion with a statutory ranking. A dismissal for operational reasons is a betriebsbedingte Kündigung, valid only where dringende betriebliche Erfordernisse make the post fall away, § 1 Abs. 2 KSchG, and once the pool of comparable employees is set, § 1 Abs. 3 KSchG takes over the choice of person through the Sozialauswahl, the employer must keep those most in need of protection and let go those least, weighing Betriebszugehörigkeit, Lebensalter, Unterhaltspflichten and Schwerbehinderung. Pick the wrong person and the dismissal is sozialwidrig and unwirksam, whatever the business case for the cut. All of this presupposes that the KSchG applies, above the small-business threshold of § 23 Abs. 1 KSchG and past the six-month waiting period of § 1 Abs. 1, below which the employer selects far more freely. Two more points travel badly, the German dismissal carries no automatic severance, an Abfindung arises only where the employer offers it under § 1a KSchG, a Sozialplan provides it, or a settlement is struck, and the machine’s Redundanz is not the employment word at all but the redundancy of a duplicated system. So redundancy is a betriebsbedingte Kündigung whose central feature, the Sozialauswahl, the English word does not announce.
Typical mistakes
- The employer does not freely choose who goes, § 1 Abs. 3 KSchG imposes a Sozialauswahl by tenure, age, maintenance duties and disability, so a redundancy translated as a free management selection misstates German law and a wrong pick voids the dismissal.
- A betriebsbedingte Kündigung carries no automatic severance, an Abfindung comes only from a § 1a KSchG offer, a Sozialplan or a settlement, so promising redundancy pay as a matter of course misreads the position.
- Redundanz is the redundancy of a duplicated system, not a job loss, so the reflex rendering names an engineering concept rather than a dismissal.
What matters
Workforce-reduction planning meets a constraint English drafting omits: a betriebsbedingte Kündigung is valid only if the post genuinely falls away, § 1 Abs. 2 KSchG, and the Sozialauswahl, § 1 Abs. 3, dictates which comparable employee is let go by social criteria. The plan that picks the redundant employee on performance or preference has ignored the ranking that decides who may lawfully be dismissed.
What the machine misses
Redundancy comes back as Redundanz in machine output surprisingly often, and that is the redundancy of a duplicated system, not the loss of a job, so the sentence slides into engineering. Where the machine does reach Kündigung, it drops the feature that governs, a betriebsbedingte Kündigung is policed by the Sozialauswahl, § 1 Abs. 3 KSchG, so the employer free choice of who to dismiss, which the English redundancy assumes, is replaced by a statutory ranking the translation never shows.
Examples
| to be made redundant | betriebsbedingt gekündigt werden |
| a redundancy payment | eine Abfindung |
| the redundancy pool | der Kreis vergleichbarer Arbeitnehmer |
| compulsory redundancy | die betriebsbedingte Kündigung |
More notes on these sections
employee Arbeitnehmer
compensation Entschädigung