Because profit comes before people in the end but I need to spew some platitudes to make it sound better. And this goes for all corporations, including Apple.
True that. It’s always about the bottom line. In big companies the employees are just interchangeable parts, no more important than pawns in their chess game.
As it should be.
Not all the time. I've worked with a company (one of the largest in its field in Europe) that could have easily justified layoffs during the economic downturn.
The problem was that in some areas where they had factories, workers were the only members of families with jobs. Laying them off would have caused severe harm to the local communities so they kept them on.
Shareholders agreed with the policy.
Companies are duty-bound to receive advice from their bean counters. Bean counter advice however, is only one perspective. Companies asking the question "but what is the right thing to do? seem to be few and far between. I read somewhere (can't recall where) that many companies, if they were individuals exhibiting this behaviour, would be diagnosed as sociopaths.
If these companies can get rid of 10,000 employees with seemingly no impact to productivity, seems like they had 10,000 employees too many.
Well, sometimes companies take a strategic decision and invest also in workforce based on that. Then, if it dries not turn out as expected, you might end up in such a situation. Generally, I feel more pity for cpmanies that are acquired by bigger ones, only to be fire sometime later, as in the example of ComiXology and Amazon. Of course, you don’t know how they would have fared without being bought, but still, feels somehow stupid.
If these companies can get rid of 10,000 employees with seemingly no impact to productivity, seems like they had 10,000 employees too many.
Not necessarily.
Say that a company have 1000 employees that makes a widget and they sell an average of 10,000 widgets a year. But because of a downturn in the economy, they are only predicting that they will sell at the most, only 8,000 widgets in the coming year and sales is already going down. The company calculate that they can manufacture 8,000 widgets with 900 employees. So they laid off 100 employees or 10% of their staff.
Did "productivity" go down? If anything, it stayed the same. If they didn't laid off 100 employees, then they would had had 100 employees too many. And productivity would go down.
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