&gt;I think &quot;made redundant&quot; has been the British term for laid off for quite a while; though this is, IME, far less common in American usage.<p>A big part of the plot in the British Office tv show was watching Ricky Gervais fumble his department through a merger that ultimately made him redundant.  He kept assuring the employees there would be no redundancies.<p>Zenefits using the term redundancies may just be colloquial British phrasing.  They&#x27;ve got much greater PR problems now that make the semantics of layoffs vs redundancies seem a minor concern.