[andagainagain]

part of the issue is how fast they want to hire them too. People do not just think of themselves as employees in waiting.

If you are a business that is going to lay off a bunch of people... temporarily... then be sure get an agreement that they will come back.

Imagine you're one of these workers laid off. You move. You find another way to live entirely, another way to pay the bills, another entire path to another entire career. Heck, even if they give you your old job back... even at a higher wage. Would you take it back? It's not an obvious decision.

[thayne]

There is a solution for that. Hire unskilled, or underqualified employees and train them. But that costs money and takes time so of course companies don't want to do that. Then there is the fear that the employee will leave and work for a competitor after you train them. The solution to that is to treat them well enough they don't want to leave. But again, that cost money.

[voisin]

Train people on the job? No no, much better to market to youngsters how much demand there is in a field and how easy it will be to get a job so they spend multiple years in school training for it theoretically, only to find upon graduation that things have changed and the industry no longer needs them. /s

In reality, on the job training has largely disappeared in the last few decades outside a handful of trades. Business has pushed the risk and costs of training to labour and the costs have subsequently skyrocketed despite lower expected return.

[thayne]

Absolutely. And then businesses complain because the external training doesn't do a good enough job preparing prospective employees for their specific needs. Go figure.

[dagenix]

Ya. Just because the company would like for people to come back, doesn't mean they have the right to expect them to. The same way that the company chooses to stop paying people, people choose that maybe they'd like to do something else.

[bruce511]

Not to mention they've created a huge amount of bad will. Got fired from the trains because "down sizing", or maybe dad did?

Now they're like, "hey come work on the railways" - and the answer is "fool me once, shame on me..."

Maybe it's not just money, maybe it's not just shitty work conditions, maybe people notice when you treat employees like commodities and choose not to become a commodity.