In aggregate, employees make a company money. That much is trivially true. At the individual level, one can be a net gain, net loss, or breakeven. I often wonder how skewed this distribution is at some companies. Ideally you trim the ones that are a net loss and thus on average aren't making the company money. Whether or not it's obvious who those people are isn't known to me. Anyway, I don't think it's a good assumption that the people being laid off are making the company money on average.