My first thought is that the writer is suggesting that companies should only lay off employees when the employees 1) are financial drains and 2) are such bad financial drains that the company would otherwise go broke. A lot of people do think that way, but it doesn't actually make any sense.
Stock buybacks are an illegal manipulation of the stock market and should be made illegal again. They encourage this horrible destructive to the country/economy/workers/and ultimately companies policy.
Forget workers rights, we all need to 'unionize' (work in union) to eliminate stock buybacks and get them reclassified as stock manipulation like there were prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency. If companies want to 'give money away' with respect to stocks, they can issue dividends, which changes to dynamics of the stock market (Prosperous pre-1980s America's 'I buy a company because it will be strong long term and pay me dividends' versus enshitified 2024 American stock market's 'I buy stocks for short term one time capital gains at the expense of all else').
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/stock-buy...
Are you going to stand in front of that employee and say, "You are being nonsensical for connecting these things."?
And if you want to say the situation I've come up is contrived and isn't perfectly representative for all workers, you are correct. But for the percentage it is accurate for, that it does represent, do you really expect them not to connect things?
It should've said:
Amazon made record breaking profit because (among other things) they laid off more than 18000 employees (2023)
Why are these two completely different metrics being put into the same title as if they correlate in some rational way?
The answer is they don’t, but it incites irrational reactions. Which, in my mind, is what Reddit is for; not HN.