Two words. Almost every person who has ever been retrenched asks them, sometimes out loud in the room, sometimes weeks later at two in the morning.
The Straits Times used them as the headline when they covered our book launch: ‘Why me?’: Retrenchment handbook addresses tough layoff conversations and other HR issues.
They chose well, because that question is the whole test. If the person on the other side of the table walks out without a clear, honest, defensible answer, everything that follows gets harder… for them, and for you.
The Person Being Retrenched Is Not Who It Used To Be
For most of my career, a downturn hit predictably. Older workers, less qualified workers, blue-collar roles.
That has flipped.
Government figures show the number of PMEs and technicians retrenched has risen in every single quarter since the start of 2025, from 2,730 in Q1 2025 to 3,320 in Q1 2026. Over the same period, retrenchments among production and transport operators, cleaners and labourers fell from 630 to 200.
Patrick Tay put it plainly at our launch. “Young and old, nobody is spared.”
“A historic, worrying surge in younger, early-career workers caught completely unprepared, alongside a staggering rise in PMET retrenchments.”
Patrick Tay, Assistant Secretary-General, NTUC, in his foreword to the handbook
It’s tempting to file all of this under AI. Tay was careful not to, and I think he’s right. “It may not be purely because of GenAI,” he said, pointing instead to companies reorganising, restructuring, reviewing their workflows and rethinking where operations should sit. GenAI is part of the picture without being the whole of it, and blaming it wholesale lets a lot of ordinary restructuring decisions off the hook. Some of those AI-driven cuts are already being reversed.
What this means practically is that the employee you’re retrenching in 2026 is more likely to be degree-educated, mid-career, articulate, financially stretched by a mortgage and school fees, and entirely capable of writing a detailed account of how you handled it.
The Rules Are Changing Underneath You
A lot of organisations are still running on 2019 assumptions, even as the conditions that drive these decisions point towards more retrenchments ahead, not fewer.
Since we published the first edition of Responsible Retrenchment that year, notification requirements have been updated, the mid-career job market has tightened considerably, and the Workplace Fairness Act 2025 is due to take effect by the end of 2027.
That last one matters more than most companies have registered. It moves anti-discrimination from advisory guidance into statutory obligation, which means your selection criteria need to be objective, documented, and capable of surviving scrutiny by someone who is looking for a reason to challenge them.
If your current answer to “why me?” is a manager’s gut feel written up after the fact, you have a problem arriving in about eighteen months.
The Internet Remembers, And It Remembers Your Version Last
The second edition puts real weight on managing the digital narrative around a retrenchment, because this is the part that has changed most since 2019.
A badly handled exit no longer stays in the room. GovTech’s exercise is a useful study in how visible these decisions have become. It reaches LinkedIn before the affected employee has left the building, and once it’s out there your employer brand is being written by someone who is hurt, accurate, and highly motivated.
I told the room at the launch that a successful retrenchment is one you don’t read about in the news. What I meant is a layoff handled carefully enough that it never escalates into a dispute requiring NTUC’s intervention, and never becomes a story about your company. Not because the goal is secrecy… but because handling it well and staying out of the headlines turn out to be the same skill.
What We Changed In The Second Edition
Sze-Yen Chee and I wrote this update because the gap between what companies believe and what is now required had grown too wide to ignore.
The new edition adds recent case studies of organisations that made real mistakes, which we’ve included deliberately as cautionary tales. It expands the practical advice from senior HR leaders who have run these exercises themselves. It maps the support ecosystem now available to affected employees, so that “we’ll help you land somewhere” becomes a specific commitment rather than a sentence in a script.
And we’ve built it as a living document. Download it and you’ll be notified whenever the guidelines or regulations shift.
Given where the numbers are heading, your organisation will have to answer “why me?” sooner or later. The only real question is whether you’ll have an answer worth giving… and whether you’ll have it ready before you need it.
Read the full Straits Times report: ‘Why me?’: Retrenchment handbook addresses tough layoff conversations and other HR issues
