On March 14, Meta announced it was cutting some ten thousand jobs from its workforce. In February, former pandemic darling Zoom made about 1,300 cuts to its employee pool. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, laid off around twelve thousand workers in January. And of course, Elon Musk’s personal decimation of Twitter’s workforce since he took control of the company has been providing content fodder since last year. In general, 2023 has been a bloodbath for workers in tech.

On the surface, this may seem like a straightforward story of once-bullish companies having to make difficult choices in the face of harsh economic realities. But there’s more than meets the eye. Recently some of these newly laid-off employees have come forward to disclose that they had been paid to perform little to no actual work. Instead, they were called to one meeting after another to be kept busy without any tasks assigned to them. Many of them took home six-figure salaries for doing essentially nothing.

Companies strategically made these superfluous hires in order to have a trust fund of talent available in anticipation of future expansion, and also to prevent rival companies from meeting their staffing needs. It’s a blatant case of labor-market manipulation, which in most cases is not favorable to workers.