This week the Bank of England forecast that 75,000 people working in the banking sector in the UK could lose their jobs. This is because many financial services companies are making plans to leave London to avoid the impact of Brexit.
Lose your job is just one of the many ways of saying that a company has stopped employing you. If a company decides they don’t need you any more, they make you redundant, lay you off or let you go.
Grammar is important here. If we focus on the actions of the company, we use the active voice:
“The bank made 2,500 people redundant when it closed its High Street branches.”
If we focus on the person affected, we use the passive voice:
“I was laid off by the insurance company at the start of the year.”
We use a different set of words if you lose your job because of something you did. For example, if you broke the company rules or broke the law. The formal word is dismiss. However, there are lots of slang terms: fire, sack, get the sack, get given your marching orders.1
So, the company report might say:
“Barry Johnson was dismissed for stealing from the Production Department.”
But Barry would probably say:
“I was fired for nicking2 stuff from work.”
Nobody likes to be made redundant and we all hope we’ll never get the sack. However, there’s one day many of us will welcome. That’s the day when we reach the age that we can retire and don’t have to go to work anymore.
Practise your listening. Click on play to hear Barney reading this text.
1
In the US they also say terminate. However, in the UK this word makes us think of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film so we associate it with something much worse than losing your job.
2
To nick is a British slang term which means to steal something.
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