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I've been through probably 3 DOZEN layoffs so far in my career. If management comes in one day out of the blue and assures you there won't be layoffs I can 100% guarantee there will be soon. (Especially when it is an executive from corporate or _military_ HQ) It happens every time. It is one of the biggest red flags of an impending layoff. You have much better hope if they are not saying stuff like that.

You do understand why.

You know that people won't work as much. Will disengage. Will cause trouble and cost you money, time, efforts.

This is resources consumed.

Some companies value saving resources over human decencies. This is magnified when there is crisis and resources are in shorter supply than before.

There is no mystery to it, no complexity to it.

But I'm not suggesting they tell everyone the company is in dire straits and they are on the verge of getting fired. Just don't willfully lie to them on a daily basis and tell them that things are amazing and their jobs are totally secure. In my scenario, we weren't actively asking questions regularly. But they were offering the (mis)information on an almost daily basis.

In my experience the actual axe coming down is done in a terse, bloodless manner for legal reasons. Up until that point, managers are comfortable being cordial. Managers I've known are terrified about being sued and decide being heartless is the safest option (for the company, and for them).

That's an american point of view, but in France not letting anyone know would actually make your more likely to be sued. Yet they have the same attitude.

The prior post called it out. It's people in the decision making chairs who are choosing short-term stability over long -term trust.

>You know that people won't work as much. Will disengage. Will cause trouble and cost you money, time, efforts.

It may be jaded of me but I believe it's rare to see a company with management that actually has the courage to be transparent and fully honest with its employees. I find that a good smoke test to see what type of management your own company has is probing what people in your company think about "transparent salaries" where everyone knows what everyone else makes. You'll see some enlightening responses if you're privy to the conversations.

The minute they leak that there are layoffs coming, every talented individual is going to start spending all their time job hunting instead of working even if they weren't going to be laid off; likewise, untalented individuals will stop giving a shit. You also have security problems if you provide advanced notice. It is inevitable that the data will get leaked which will affect share price before a narrative can be composed, you give vindictive employees time to steal IP, data, or physical goods before they are out the door, and you provide a window of time for people to damage systems.

Unfortunately the best way to do it from the company's perspective is to be sudden and surgical, giving people 0 time to sabotage the company.

they do it so employees don't quit beforehand, so that they can keep using them to make money until the last second, while not giving them any opportunity to find a new job so they don't miss rent the week after they're fired

if it's not illegal it should be, and I'm sure there is some ground for a civil lawsuit in the fact they they assured them they would not lose their jobs, thereby costing them thousands in lost income when they're laid off and having nothing else lined up, in this case it could be a class action.

We have no compassion as a society anymore (if we ever had any), its been supplanted by greed.

There is such a law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.

Or they can just say "try and sue us, we'll be in bankruptcy before you get the papers filed anyway".

Great points, this is very much also true on my experience. Once the decision is made to lay off, often work is done to make sure that they don't use company resources to get their next job. It's quite accepted in business circles, but from the outside it really sounds heartless.

Also, I suspect, so they can have some control over who leaves.

When employees start leaving on their own, the first to leave are going to be the highly skilled but underpaid ones. They are attractive, relatively inexpensive to attract away, and have relatively little incentive to stay. They're also the ones the company most wants to hold on to, for similar reasons.

A similar thing happens with seemingly healthy companies going bust overnight.

There's a reason they never let anyone know: it would be self-fulfilling if they let the world know they were in trouble.

I'm not saying they need to let the world know. But don't actively tell them on a daily basis that the company is in excellent shape and everyone is safe and secure for the foreseeable future.

This is actually very typically “thou dost protest too much” behavior. You should always read management signally counterfactually and look for inside information via private communication.

> I just don't understand why. Who treats people like that?

The people making the decision to do the layoffs are distanced from the people being laid off by one or more levels of hierarchy, so they never have to look the employees in the eye. It's left to middle management to do the dirty work.