From an accounting standpoint, yes. They always have been.
Employees are an expense to a business. They are an expense a business cannot do without, as they generate income.
An employee who does not contribute significantly to a business, however, is an expense that should be eliminated.
It seems to me that many businesses have used this financial downturn to lay off or fire the people that were not top notch workers. Many found out that the best job security was to do a good job and make yourself a valued employee.
An efficient, streamlined workforce increases profit.
Depends on which employees you're talking about. In good times, companies carry the doofus nice guy because they CAN. Whether they should or not is another question, but everybody likes him and he doesn't do any harm. That one's an expense, not a contributor. In BAD times, DNG's out the door.
Yes. More customers means more profits. More employees mean less profits.
There is a tradeoff of course, if you are getting lots more customers, you might need more employees to serve the demand.
But without customers, employees are obviously just an expense. And the situation for all these companies with lowered revenues is that customers aren't coming in the door. In that case, having employess sitting on their thumbs waiting for customers is just an expense.
Yes they’re an expense if the company isn’t selling enough product to cover the employees wages. By keeping a larger than needed work force, they’re going down the path General Motors took. How did that work out?
On the income statement, yes they are considered expenses. Why do you think all that outsourcing happened? We can all thank Jack Welsh for coming up with that idea. All be it, they are dead wrong with that thought process, but that is the way today’s execs think.