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My father relayed a story to me about a factory in Toronto that he used to buy supplies from for over 40 years. It was a small, tightly knit workforce of about

My father relayed a story to me about a factory in Toronto that he used to buy supplies from for over 40 years. It was a small, tightly knit workforce of about 50 people. Mostly immigrants with woodworking skills. When hard times hit North America in the early 1970s, the owner lowered everybody's hours to equate to 6 hours of work per day instead of laying anybody off. The owner wasn't being altruistic. He was worried that if he laid off anybody that they would go to his competitors when the economy turned around. Taking with them valuable skills and insider knowledge of how his factory operated. The workers were happy to be getting 75% of their pay instead of 0%, and the company lasted another 30 years after that with much of the same workforce.

crpatino 11y ago
The key is in "tightly knit workforce". Back during the Big Recession of 2008, my then-bosses announced that they were going to require mandatory unpaid timeoff* from every employee in order to minimize the number of positions being eliminated. That meeting had not even ended, and people was already bitching about how they were not going to be able to keep afloat their over-leveraged lifestyles, and how unfair it was for them to subsidize the non-unemployment of a bunch of losers. Apparently none of the complainers though they would end up on the loser side of things. *Nothing devastating, lit. one or two days per month.