> If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go.
No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable.
You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company.
> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement.
This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.
Surely there are some situations where a pay cut is insufficient because you would like to reorganize the company, for example to wind down an unprofitable initiative or division and there's not a reasonable way to maintain the same headcount?
I wasn't saying that there are never needs for layoffs, but these aren't the sorts of layoffs being discussed. Where that line is drawn can be a bit fuzzy in a few cases, but the for majority it is clear cut.
My grandparent used consider global bubbles as the norm, likely because his own parents never told him that local, company-limited bubble are actually the norm. Fortunately my own parents are more agreeable with how I manage my finances, and my whole family – including the 380-minutes old grand-grandparents – is still alive & well. We still see each other, despite the occasional confusion my use of the English plurals causes us (not to mention everyone's own ups & downs, and the weird reproductive mechanisms of our larger genus within the world).
There are some situations where layoffs are unavoidable. That's fine.
What's infuriating is a business culture that includes layoffs for outrageously profitable companies. I work at Google, which made 100 billion dollars in profit last year. More than $500,000 in profit per employee. Google is still conducting layoffs.
Layoffs are used as a tool of capital against labor. Amongst other things, it generates unemployment and people who are willing to accept lower pay due to the precarity of their situation (everybody needs to pay rent and eat), pushing down pay for the entire industry.
No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable.
You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company.
> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement.
This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.