Because you always need to find some reason why you lay of which is satisfying for various parties (through not really the people fired, but investors both curr

Because you always need to find some reason why you lay of which is satisfying for various parties (through not really the people fired, but investors both current and future, people with shares, companies you sell to, the public, etc.). And "currently everyone does so and the economy is bad" is a good excuse. And there are many reasons why a company might lay of people even if it's currently not strictly necessary: - you don't really need that many people (anymore), common for small companies which grew to fast - you want to restructure your company majorly and doing it will less people is easier - you prefer to go a bit slower, so that e.g. current investment money lasts longer - you want to be more robust to a potential economic dive, so you reduce money cost at the cost of going a bit slower and in turn can compensate hits in actual revenue better (at least for some time) - you have accumulated a bunch of people which are not bad enough to fire them because of performance but also you know you can get better people, so you use it as an excuse to let people go, go slower for a "not short but not too long" while and then rehire. Alternatively companies like Amazone do that every year fire bottom x% then rehire roughly the same amount. - you expect salaries to fall in the industry as a whole by quite a bit - financial distress (e.g. interest rates and/or profit) Lastly group dynamics to affect Investors, CEOs, Board Members, HR people etc. too, so it might be a "everyone does so so we better do so, too" situation (potentially forced onto the company by the board of shareholders).