That lays bare the economics of the layoff in a very easy-to-understand way, provided the raises don't eat up all the savings from the layoffs. Using nice roun

That lays bare the economics of the layoff in a very easy-to-understand way, provided the raises don't eat up all the savings from the layoffs. Using nice round numbers, the following would need to be true for the layoffs to make sense: You have a team of 20, each making 100k/year, but a lot of downtime for all of them. At your current clip, you can only afford 1.5M/year total for your team. You have enough work for maybe 13 at a reasonable pace for your wages, or 10 at a higher pace. So you could let 7 go and risk morale problems with the unchanged wages, or you let 10 go, give 30% raises to match the raised demands, and your payroll is still less than what you can afford. If all of that was explained, alongside copious expressions of ownership on the part of the people responsible for not driving enough business in, I would gladly work again for the people laying me off.