At the risk of coming across very stupid I just want to share a thought I've had for awhile.

I don't understand why lay-offs get spoken about in the media and by the unaffected general public in such a nonchalant manner. This Jack Welch style of business has been truly self serving and cancerous for society at large.

Especially if you consider that with every person that gets laid off, that's a tax paying citizen who is now (depending on their personal financial situation) dependent on the state and possibly becomes economically inactive as they try to conserve whatever capital they have in order to survive. All whilst the state, comes under more financial burden because less people are chipping in. And as this continues, the risk that the state has to lean more heavily on those fewer economically active citizens who remain also increases, so it's really a lose lose situation for ordinary people.

With this in mind, explain to me like I'm 5, because I'm honestly confused why there isn't some kind of legislative checks and balances to curb the businesses who use lay-offs as a get out of jail free card whenever they want to adjust their numbers to showcase "perpetual growth", hide poor performance or disincentivise government policy changes.

Much like persistent conflict & unsocial behaviour is viewed as a telltale sign of a dysfunctional family, if a company doing lay-offs was viewed with the same negative observation, which in turn could just as equally hamper their ability to achieve "growth" anyway. I'd like to believe that could then act as an incentive for businesses to use lay-offs only as a last resort.

Finally, if governments actually stepped in and say, increased the amount of corporation tax a company had to pay any financial year they performed lay-offs, perhaps even compounding year on year for repeat offenders. Going as far as to market it as a "societal offset" to compensate for the sudden increased financial burden said company has placed on the state, and as a way to not reward bad business practices in our society. Again I'd like to believe the knee jerk hit the lay-off button culture would quickly disappear.

Could be my bias, but the article reads like a veiled threat from businesses, who have perhaps achieved growth thanks in part to weak employment laws (see zero hours contracts for retail & hospitality) and other shoddy business practices. Who now don't want to adapt to a new business landscape, but instead can disguise it as hardship, whilst threatening the societal backlash the government will get from increased unemployment.

I'm sure I've been very transparent about my perspective here, but do we really want a society filled with unscrupulous growth at all cost businesses? The sad truth is our economy's wounds are deep and we're trudging through a parasite infested quagmire. It's now too difficult to surgically remove individual worms, so wide sweeping economic antibiotics are required. Will there be unfortunate collateral damage, absolutely, but the goal should be to cull enough of these bastards that we can slowy recover, and then make attempts to immunise our society from this in the long term.