Meaning
A generous payment made to an executive on leaving a company - whether dismissed, retired out, or eased aside by restructuring - typically written into the contract in advance. Where the golden parachute cushions a takeover casualty, the handshake is broader and often sweeter, bundling severance with retirement-level benefits. Business and news register; the tone ranges from envious to indignant. Distinctions have softened, but handshake tends to cover retirement and agreed exits, parachute a takeover-triggered one. Regional use: General English; British origin (mid-1960s).
Origin
A British coinage of the mid-1960s: the term is credited to Frederick Ellis, city editor of the Daily Express, and Max Cryer's Who Said That First records the attribution. The 1980s made the phrase notorious on both sides of the Atlantic - the largest recorded handshake went to F. Ross Johnson, who left RJR Nabisco in February 1989 with 53.8 million dollars, a sum noted by Guinness World Records - and New Zealand had its own bout of controversy in the late 1990s over severance payouts to departing state-sector executives. Lexicographers treat it as the umbrella term of the golden family: Wiktionary defines it as a generous severance payment, especially as an inducement to leave, and records the relations - golden handcuffs, golden hello, golden parachute, and the rarer green and silver handshakes. A 1997 Labour Research citation catches the phrase in full cry over two Lloyds TSB executives departing with substantial golden handshakes after the takeover.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- golden goodbye
- golden handshakes
- silver handshake
Usage Examples
- The deputy chief executive left with a golden handshake that exceeded the branch-closure savings he had delivered.
- After thirty years service, her golden handshake was the house deposit her salary had never quite covered.
- The authority now caps golden handshakes at six months' salary, a rule written in embarrassment.