> You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn. Well, you can, but not as direct emplo

> You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn. Well, you can, but not as direct employees. The usual way is to enter a service contract with a different company who hires the employees and assigns them to work on bigcorp's tasks for 100% of their time. If bigcorp wants to cut costs, they just let the contract with the other company lapse and that company can fire their employees on the basis of "my own economic outlook is bad because we lost the bigcorp contract".