Word.ws English Dictionary

natural wastage

natural wastage noun: decrease of workforce caused by non-replacement of retiring or voluntarily resigning employees and not by deliberate layoffs.

Noun

natural wastage (uncountable)

  1. (UK) Decrease of workforce caused by non-replacement of retiring or voluntarily resigning employees and not by deliberate layoffs.
    • Of the total labour force now threatened with redundancy, of course, a proportion will be covered by natural wastage, so that the number eventually thrown out of railway work will be well below 19,000.1962 October, “Talking of Trains: B.R. works staff cut by a third”, in Modern Railways, page 221
    • From just over 476,500 employees in 1962, by 1973 the total was just over 250,000. Much of this was achieved via 'natural wastage' - controlling recruitment closely and not replacing staff as they retired.2023 March 22, Mike Esbester, “Staff, the public and industry will suffer”, in RAIL, number 979, page 39
    Synonyms:
    attrition

Synonyms of natural wastage

Antonyms

Questions about natural wastage

What does natural wastage mean?
Natural wastage means decrease of workforce caused by non-replacement of retiring or voluntarily resigning employees and not by deliberate layoffs.
What part of speech is natural wastage?
Natural wastage is a noun.

Words near natural wastage in the dictionary

  1. natural uranium
  2. natural user interface
  3. natural user interfaces
  4. natural vowel
  5. natural vowels
  6. natural wastage
  7. natural-born
  8. naturalesque
  9. naturalest
  10. naturalia
  11. naturalisation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: natural wastage (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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