Public companies trying to keep investors happy and share prices good during a downturn.
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.
If you had to identify the top three things (in terms of impact) that could be changed (albeit with difficulty) to reduce the chances of employees being stuffed into cannons, what would they be?
My three would be:
1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA.
2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee treatment (or others, within some notion of reasonableness*), make this metric public, provide some sort of accounting and accountability for it, and let shareholders adjust accordingly.
3. The quarterly reporting of public companies. This makes long-term planning and investment much harder.
* I haven't studied this very broadly. I'm familiar with the Triple Bottom Line and B-Corporations.
As far as I know, you can satisfy your fiduciary requirements by treating employees well simply by claiming that it attracts better employees and avoids costs associated with searching for new ones.
Keeping unproductive employees on in a punch-clock make-work position benefits no-one. If we're going to broadly restructure society to make this kind of thing better, we'd be better off strengthening the social safety net and getting rid of all the stuff that says you have to have a single full-time job or your life will suck. Nationalise healthcare, remove all the weird tax/benefit cliffs that happen when a job goes over/under x hours/week, legalise building more homes in places people want to live...
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.