This is unthinkable in the EU. If a company isn’t sure about the needed force, they need to hire temps.
If you don’t have a technical or economical reason, you are not even allowed to lay off an employee.
And you have to give notice for a period, which is proportional to the time you worked for the company, or you have to pay this fully as severance and this can be more than a year.
Protected employees (voted as union representatives) are even harder to fire.
This does come with the downside that some, almost not productive, colleagues never get fired. But I guess it beats the alternative of having almost no protection.
The US companies claim they have economic reasons but really this is just part of a cycle that shareholders understand but companies hope employees will not.
They claim they’re fixing problems by firing people, but for the most part these are companies that are more profitable than ever.
There’s much less worker protection in the US, though. A lot of these companies have EU branches and I bet those EU branches are mostly left alone during these layoffs for that reason.
