[tyingq]

>Do you suggest they keep employees around with nothing to do because of significantly reduced shipping demand?

It's not unheard of in the past to resort to salary cuts, reduced hours, etc, while they bridge some solution or wait out what might be temporary.

There's also the notion of better planning. If you suspect, for example, a demand spike is temporary...there are ways to deal with that other than overhiring employees.

[jryle70]

They went from 80k employees in 2020 to 100k in 2022 (mentioned somewhere in this thread). Now they cut 10k. Maybe that is good planning? Maybe over hiring make responding to demand quicker? There are all kind of consideration, and yet people are quick to blame them without knowing facts.

[chrisdbanks]

Your electricity demands probably change drastically between summer and winter. Do you not use electricity during the winter because you know you won't need as much during the summer? People are a resource just like electric. There needs to be flexibility for elasticity. This is why redundancy exists as a concept. Of course people should be compensated for elastic demand and you can of course always seek to increase your notice period to increase your security.

[tyingq]

Right, and for example, contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees. Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality. Or skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area, etc.

Or at least being up-front about the temporary nature of the employment and structuring the program to suit that. "Seasonal hires" have a different expectation.

[marcosdumay]

> contractors are often a better match for fluctuating demand rather than employees

Not when it's universal and systemic.

> Or diversification of market offerings to reduce seasonality

And this is good, but really too much to ask if you are going to require it.

> skill diversification for employees so they can be repositioned during low demand in one area

This also doesn't work when the changes are global and systemic. But then, most of the layoffs we have seen in the past were rushed things that didn't even bother to evaluate this option. This one cuts me as done in around the shortest timing to make this possible, so we'd need to check if they tried it or not.

We also don't know if they were up-front about the temporary nature of those employees. They are certainly not formally temporary because the timing doesn't work here (what is good for the employees anyway), but we don't know if they were warned.