I never quite understand it. If you lay off 1700 employees and the company is better off for it, what were those 1700 people doing. Hangin’ at the water cooler? Who hired the 1700 duds in the first place?
Have you ever been someplace that had deep layoffs like that? Here are the stages:
1) Promises that the company is going to be more efficient, and they realize the remaining staff can't do all the work of the laid-off employees.
2) Reorganization, shuffling the deck chairs in a disruptive way so that no one knows who is responsible for what.
3) The settling of the dust, in which people find they are, in fact, doing the jobs of all the laid off employees.
4) Stress, burnout, low morale. If the general economy is good and people have options, retention suffers. If the economy is bad and people fear not being able to find another job, they stay.
5) Rinse, lather, repeat.
I can tell you why banks do it. You need 2 supervisors for every department, no matter how small the staff, because you don’t trust your employees by themselves without a Big Brother to micro-manage every minute of your day. And you over-hire to the point where people are running out of things to do at 11 am, just so people can go on “vacation”, which doesn’t mean taking a 1-week or 2-weeker, but that people are stringing out one day here and one day there so it ends up people who are supposed to be working 40 hours end up with a 4-day work week, so you always “need” (very loose term) extra coverage no matter what day it is. End of rant!