From the linked article:
The company has appointed agents who will now work to release the company’s assets and discharge its liabilities.
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In the UK, it’s one week if you’ve worked at that place for at least a month but less than two years. and one week per year of employment if you’ve worked there two years or more, up to a maximum of 12 weeks.
That’s statutory notice. Employment contracts may offer more (but never less).
Pay can be given in lieu of notice if the employment contract allows for it.
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Ah, I’ll disagree there.
That’s not telling them. That’s compensating them.
Important too but a different thing.
And by the way over here how much notice you get depends on your contract and is subject to a statutory minimum of one week’s pay per full year of employment.
Ninja’d (more accurately) by SheiffFatman. 
Is this memo any worse than the usual mealy-mouthed corporate speak about how “As you know trading conditions have been particularly hard for several years, thanks to local authority budget cuts/ Brexit/ nasty foreign competition (pick whichever or several). Unfortunately, in consultation with the company’s accountants and the auditors, it has been concluded that the business is no longer viable and must close with immediate effect.”
As I say, I smell nervous breakdown. Small business owner who has genuinely had enough of the stress and worry who snapped and decided to shut the business down more or less in a fit of pique/despair because he is a small business owner/entrepreneur and therefore incapable of saying “I can’t cope” and has to pretend to be going out on his own terms rather than saying “This business has failed and I can’t fix it. It is a dead business and all that remains is to put it down.”
Edit to add: If the business is insolvent (and it sounds as if it is) there is some provision for the employees as the state will cover some of the redundancy/notice pay if the company can’t:
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it’s all the same social contract, we don’t get a line item veto on these things, without a cost.
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I can’t speak to UK employment law, but at the very least – UK contract law is close enough to the US – that he’s certainly going to be on the hook for the cost of the council having to hire buses on an emergency basis; that’s certainly a foreseeable cost of breach. Fuck it, sure, but fuck his own wallet while it at it.
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That’s the 21st century fo you, where ‘the man’ says, “Take this job and shove it. I ain’t workin’ here no more.”, imagining himself a latter-day John Gault.
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Do they not understand the New Economy doesn’t allow families or homes? We’re all supposed to be twenty-somethings doing whatever it takes to undercut each other for wages, that’s pretty close to the entirety of the 21st century model.
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I’ll grant it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”
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In my town, we outsourced the school buses and then had to cancel school repeatedly because the pay was so low they didn’t have enough staff to drive the buses. Do you know how much that costs in babysitting and missed work, when every parent of a young child has to scramble for last-minute childcare? A lot more than it saved in taxes, I bet. (Not to mention the education disruption.)
They also outsourced the disability accessible ride service for our public transit system, and that company went out of business abruptly, stranding riders and leaving employees owed a lot of back pay. But obviously it is always better and more efficient to have a private company run these services, because what couldn’t be improved by firing all the experienced staff, cutting funding, adding administrative complexity, removing public accountability, and skimming off a profit?
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Or you could, you know, pays your money and take your choice to employ people directly to deliver the service as public employees. Good, stable jobs for community members, direct control over quality of services. Crazy talk, I know.
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Ooooo. Adding “Having a lie in in my scratchers” to my list of excuses for why I can’t come in to work today. That’s sure to discourage requests for additional details.
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I can’t comment on your domestic arrangements, but it’s more conventional to have a lie-in in just the one scratcher.
Scratcher < scratch your head < bed
[Traditional rhyming slang doesn’t have to make sense]
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Ah, then clearly the man meant “y’all have a lie-in in all-y’all’s scratchers”.
Because it would be weird for all the employees to be sharing a single bed. Appropriately Dickensian, given the circumstances, but weird nonetheless.
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Nah, they prefer to walk away and dump management on someone else - complaining that legal problems and regulations make it too difficult for them to make a decent profit.
When the political climate changes in their favor, they come crawling back:
http://everything.explained.today/George_W._Hill_Correctional_Facility/
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When I lived in NJ, there were multiple incidents when districts had to sue in order to dismiss school superintendents before their employment contracts expired. I often wondered why they seemed to have better legal resources than the state. In the end, those districts had to pay a lot of money to the outgoing people while trying to find replacements.
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Ah, so you are a communist, then? Don’t you know, that it’s but one easy step between employing bus drivers instead of employing someone to employ bus drivers and dragging off half of Somerset to the gulags?
Do you know who employed bus drivers? That’s right. STALIN.
#nocommunistbusesforbritishchildren
(Sarcasm. Obviously. But also only slightly sillier than arguments I’ve heard advanced in apparent earnest.)
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Privatization of public services, especially public/private set-ups are simply a rent seeking/looting operation. Neo-liberalism transfers wealth from the many to the… fuck it…
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“I have had enough and realise I cannot work with you, the people I employ, a moment longer. There comes a time in any relationship when you just have to say ‘Fuck it’, say goodbye and move on. This is my time! I am quitting to pursue my dream of not having to work here. The gates are now closed and will not open so you can stay in your scratchers and have a lie in.”
This sounds like the kind of tweet Trump would send* if he were threatened with impeachment - a way to make himself go out feeling like a winner, even though by sending it he’s only proving himself a quitter and a loser.
* except for the correct grammar and spelling, of course.
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