Hard to know for sure, but it might well have been more self-serving than that: good employees might have been hard to come by, and hard to re-acquire/retrain o

Hard to know for sure, but it might well have been more self-serving than that: good employees might have been hard to come by, and hard to re-acquire/retrain once lost, so maybe he just wanted to keep them around and occupied so that they'd still be available once demand rose again.