This is called furlough. US and state governments do it sometimes too, though usually a day or two at a time.

Exactly. The company needed to save a ton of money in 2009, so, instead of laying anyone off, they gave everyone an extra 4 weeks of vacation and an equivalent cut in their salary for the year.

It still amounts to punishing the workers for the failings of management.

You've never run a business, have you?

Your comment isn't aligned with reality on many fronts. Take it from someone who had to pay for employee salaries using credit cards and a second mortgage on my home back in 2008/9 just to keep them employed as long as possible while searching for solutions.

That is not how business works. Mangers don't have crystal balls. On the other hand, if they did, and saw the massive 2008 economic downturn, it's likely people would have been laid off en-masse months before they did. Good management doesn't mean you see every single approaching storm. And, no, corporations are not evil or greedy.

Shit happens and you deal with it as best you can. Most people think large companies have more wiggle room but that is generally not true at all. Their mass and scale can be very damaging.

I remember talking to one of our automation (as in hardware, not software) suppliers back in 2009. Their orders went from 1,200 machines per month to 200. And this happened, quite literally, over one or two quarters.

When you have an infrastructure built-up over time to service a certain level of business and, overnight, almost without warning, your business gets cut down to one sixth of it's prior size, well, things have to change and they have to change very quickly.

The options are: Drain the company of all cash, everyone loses their jobs and the company goes out of business. Or, lay-off a sizable portion of your workforce, sell off assets, restructure and generally do anything you can to stay alive, remain viable and see daylight on the other side of the singularity that tried to kill you.

Do you really think corporations aren't greedy? Which I do not think is evil. I know business is hard, but the whole model of cutthroat profit seeking (which encourages bad faith actors) is what I have a problem with, so it's not exactly a compelling defense.

Can you please provide examples of "cutthroat profit seeking"?

I am looking for numbers.

  - Product retail price
  - Materials costs
  - Sub-assembly costs
  - Labor costs
  - Spoilage
  - Operating costs
  - Variable costs related to that product or product line
  - Inventory levels
  - Distribution pipeline details
  - Transporation costs
  - Cost of distribution
  - Insurance
  - Legal costs
  - Other regulatory costs
  - Marketing costs
  - Support costs
  - Costs incurred due to exchange rate fluctuations

And compare these to the same numbers for the next competitor down the line.

You might just be surprised by what you learn through this simple exercise.

Not necessarily. Perhaps there actually are too many workers for the amount of work there is.

If you aren't selling enough product, you have to slow the factory down. But factories often don't slow down efficiently, it can be better to just work 4-day weeks for a while.

It's not really managements fault that we have a boom-bust economy.

And... I think most people prefer a little collective belt tightening and to the risk of losing their livelihood.

Which is another failure of management, and still causing the workers to be punished.

Managers are not oracles, they can't always anticipate boom and bust cycles on the market, nor - if they can - does it always make sense to scale production capacity down and back up if the cycles are short.