If you have a thousand people assembling doodads and the demand falls by 50% you eventually need to get rid of 50% of the doodad manufacturers. How do you choose who to fire?
Usually companies do that by closing an entire factory and/or shifting production offshore. The performance of any individual at a location that is closing is irrelevant to the decision makers.
Under Intel both happened, sites were shut with people relocated to the main hubs (Portland in the US, Poland in Europe, somewhere in India too) and anyone with 'bad' (less than the median grade) were laid off too.