Absent a written contract to the contrary severance packages are NOT required by law, in fact Florida's laws for employment are some of the least favorable in the US for employees. Absent a written contract for employment, the employee is an at will employee and can be terminated for any reason at all as long as it is not based solely on age/race/sex/disability. There is no FL or Federal law mandating severance, and FL does not mandate payment of unused vacation pay at termination unless the employer has a policy in place to do so.

Severance is something employees can try to negotiate with the employer, but it is not something the employer is mandated to provide unless they have a written agreement to do so. Generally, when severance is offered the average for a regular non-management employee is 1-2 weeks per year of employment and benefit payments for that same number of weeks. In exchange, the employer will insist that the employee waive all rights to sue for any reason. But again, this is something that is at the discretion of the employer and is not mandated by the laws in FL or the US.

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I provided you the information on the laws. We do not have their employee manuals, if you want those you need to get the employee manual from the employer. I am telling you that severance is not mandated by law, I am not privy to their employee handbook to read as your wife who is an employee is. Also, vacation time that is not used, this would have to be specified as being paid on termination in the handbook. Again, I do not have a handbook to read, it would have to be specified in there in order for her to be entitled to it under the law. All I can advise you on is what the laws themselves provide which I have done. Every company has different policies, even if you were to go into an attorney's office if you needed interpretation on HCA's policies you would have to bring them the handbook to review and I believe you are being overly unfair in your criticism because we do not have access to that manual. If you want to know their specific policies, since the laws do not mandate they provide severance or payment of vacation time, you need to read the handbook. As far as negotiation of severance, this is something an employee can do, but again, unless they have a mandate to pay severance in their handbook (which again we do not have access to read) the employer does not even have to entertain such negotiation.

I know you may have been expecting more, but again, we are not privy to handbooks from every employer and without that we cannot interpret the employer's individual policies.

Suspecting age discrimination and proving it are two different things. There have been several court cases recently where only workers over 40 were terminated by an employer. They sued for age discrimination. The case was dismissed at summary judgment because the court found that it is normal that most older workers are also the highest paid because of seniority and when an employer shows they laid off older workers because of economic reasons of them being higher paid and replaced them with younger workers who were paid less money, this was not age discrimination, but a valid economic reason. If there is some additional evidence besides just the fact she is 61, such as comments about age in the workplace or them treating her differently than workers under 40 in some way other than just a layoff, then this is something she would bring as a complaint with the EEOC (unless they give her a severance where they will make her sign a waiver agreeing to not make any claims of discrimination which they will insist on for her to get the severance) and the EEOC would have to investigate before she could go to court as part of the requirement of exhausting administrative remedies before going to court.