It's like when you cancel your Netflix when money is tight and then resub once you can afford it again.

We are just labor subscriptions for corporations.

First you cut the costs and get a bonus for that, then you fill the empty roles, and then get a bonus for that

Quarterly profits were down. Next quarter is irrelevant.

Because a lot of CEOs these days only care about quarterly reports. When interest rates went up, companies cost to do business also went up, so to keep the red profit line going up, they had to cut costs somewhere. Labor makes up most of the expenses so layoffs and forced RTO happened.

These CEOs don’t care that they lose years of experience when employees leave. And by the time the lack of experience catches up to the companies shitting themselves, the CEOs hope to have moved on to something else with their massive stock rewards for “increasing shareholder value”. Even the Boeing CEO who wasn’t lucky enough to leave before shit hit the fan is going to get a golden parachute. So really no downside for them.