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It's almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it's kind of always been a thing for them to "encourage" resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It's what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
I've seen the induced attrition, but with control. So let's say the company on a 'healthy' year gives out a 14% bonus to everyone (and the salary is calibrated with the expectation of that large bonus). So they decide they want attrition, sorry, they can't afford the bonus that year, everyone just has to learn to do without. Ok, disastrous, except they also identify some key folks and give them like 30% bonus in stock that vests over two years and/or a cash bonus with a clause that they are entitled for that to be paid back if the employee quits. So those people manage to get the same money (or more), though with strings attached, so they aren't inclined to quite unless they have an amazing competitive offer.
I've also seen a new executive come along and admit the strategy was being used, called it BS, and announced bonus was going to be significant but they were laying off folks.
The added olive on the shit pizza here is that skilled maintenance personnel, at least where I am, are a fairly small trade, and word gets around. I’ve never heard of “official” blackballing, but we ticketed folks gossip pretty readily about industry employers, and are in high demand.
Moves like that will guarantee that they can’t get experienced tradies, and even if they do, the ones that are willing to go to their next shutdown will be keeping an eye out for trouble, and at the slightest sign of bullshit and will probably cackle with glee while screwing with this employer.
Beware the phrase “I can retire anytime.”
Someone laid off is out and angry. Maybe talking smack about them, sue, might come back and cause a scene. Someone resigning already got what they wanted, to never see the employer again. It's like when you have a mentally unstable ex and make her feel like she broke up with you so you don't come out to find your tires slashed.
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too...
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don't have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It's shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It's actually really smart, as long as you don't have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said "ok, we are ready to schedule your start date". I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn't have been a great place to work.
That's messed up.
That's capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It's already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they've got one of the best unions around.
It also doesn't work in a tight labor market. This happened to me, I just laughed and blocked them, because in the 6 months it took them to get around to me I already had a better paying job with a competitor.
So much of the whining that companies are doing these days boils down to assholes who took advantage after the 2008 recession and got used to abusing employees and potential employees as a normal way of doing business.
Now that the market is tighter, and workers have more options, that shit isn't working as well as it used to, and rather than just adjust, or even change their ways, no, it's better to complain that nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE!
Be careful
This exact thing happened at one place I worked years ago: the old plant manager retired so they sent out an interim manager from their home location states away from our facility.
Obviously she wanted to get back home so they made hiring a new plant manager a top priority. Eventually they found this guy who'd been like an assistant plant manager at some place that had closed down (maybe a red flag?!). So he got started and immediately, like within a month, started hiring on a bunch of his friends who'd lost their jobs at the old place when it shut down.
At first it was great because he was filling vacancies which made everyone's load lighter. Then all the vacancies were filled but he still had more friends to bring in, so he started creating positions to bring in more people. Suddenly they were "coordinator" positions who basically only served as middlemen between other management, people who used to do their own work now had a staff of 2 or 3 people, etc.
Eventually even that bloated staff ran out of room for his old friends...and then all that staff started talking a toll on the budget...
...so over a few months they started mass layoffs of anyone who wasn't part of the new plant manager's circle of friends. Basically if you didn't work with him before at the old place, weren't part of the union, and weren't part of his Thursday golf crew, you were sent packing. Over one week he got rid of like 30 people.
After I got it, I heard from friends that within a month they were mandating that any employee with specialized skills (read: I didn't have any friends with that skill so we couldn't get rid of you) had to take at least one weekend shift and pick up 8 extra hours through the week, every week, for minimum 56 hour weeks... because they no longer had the staffing to get it all done.
Well, that's nothing new, it's at least been a thing for the last 20 years I've been working.
Best use of that I've seen was a manager that always pushed to get new headcount, and then never wanted to fill it. Because the company counted cancelling unfilled positions toward a departments required layoff requirements, so several layoff rounds spared every actual employee in his department.
That works until the company re-evaluates how many people that team needs...
It probably contributed to them kicking him out of management one day.
That’s utterly diabolical if that was the intention
The devil himself is afraid of the machinations in the mind of the average human resources manager.
Not to mention that the company doesn't have to pay unemployment for those that resign but do for those that are laid off.
i struggle to understand that even from a sociopathic viewpoint here, productivity drop would far exceed any wage savings