[perlgeek]

I've read up a bit on it, and it seems I was wrong. I was under the impression that some kind of regulatory body that told Google that they don't have a good enough reason to lay off people, but it might have been their own council.

To lay off somebody, a company needs a reason, and the bar for being laid off because of redundancy is pretty high. You have to be able to proof that either the economic situation is bad enough that other measures don't help, or that their labor had been automated away, or other possible reasons that don't apply here (like seasons for seasonal workers).