How Zildjian, a 390-year-old family business, avoids layoffs (2013)
The article doesn&#x27;t spend 1 second explaining the answer promised in the title but keeps reinforcing how <i>good</i> and flowery it is that Zildjian doesn&#x27;t lay off anyone.<p>I&#x27;m in the audio hardware industry, and the answer is clear. Yes, being a no-growth company is a big reason, and yes, they&#x27;re incredibly selective of their new employees. And they&#x27;re a stable company, which helps. Go to NAMM, ship products to retailers, design next year&#x27;s product, repeat. Incredibly stable.<p>But they have ups and downs just like every other company, which <i>at best</i> follows the trend of the industry&#x27;s economy. There are two options a company will do to cope with this situation.<p>1) Lay off X% of their workforce, shielding their existing employees from the financial &quot;downs&quot;.<p>2) Lay off 0%, increase the workload of everyone to account for the financial losses, and see who quits.<p>This is incredibly common in the &quot;tech arts&quot; industries like pro audio hardware because their employees can easily find better paying (2x) jobs elsewhere but choose the audio industry because they&#x27;re following their personal dreams.
They&#x27;re much more willing to make large sacrifices at their job, so they are less adverse to leaving if their boss says they need to hammer out 120 cymbals a day instead of 80.
And of course some people quit and often decide their dream isn&#x27;t worth it anymore.
It&#x27;s a bit easier for the company because there&#x27;s less paperwork when someone quits, and they&#x27;re guaranteed to keep their most passionate employees (by the algorithm&#x27;s design).<p>To hire more employees during the financial &quot;ups&quot;, they just continue their campaigns that working them is the <i>best job ever</i> despite the low pay, because well, to some wanna-be-cymbal-builders, that&#x27;s the truth. Imagine loving your Zildjian cymbals since you were 7 years old, finally with the opportunity to work for them when you&#x27;re 20! (fine print: 46 hard hours at $28k&#x2F;yr)<p>Nothing&#x27;s really bad about this. It&#x27;s just high supply and low demand of workers, so I&#x27;m not saying one method is better than the other. I&#x27;m just trying to offer my view on the topic of the article, since the actual article fails to address their own question at all. (The only near-answer I in the article is that the employees aren&#x27;t fully replaced by automation but instead moved to other jobs, but come on, how is Zildjian different from the other tens of millions of jobs in America that can&#x27;t be replaced by automation? This is hardly the real reason in Zildjian&#x27;s case.)