Originally Posted by aklim

To paraphrase you, if someone thinks that hiring and firing is always an absolute clear cut decision........ he's a moron....... but, no surprise there.

It might come as a surprise to you but I have personally run across employers who have what I would call "luxury employees". They are there to take up the slack. My wife used to work as a "mobile unit" nurse. She was trained in all departments of the hospital. They would plug her in and out of units that were understaffed at the moment. Why? One of the reasons is that they don't have to have as many nurses per unit to take care of unexpected shortages or higher than average census. Their regular nurses were inflexible so if they had lower census in ICU they could not send them to the Ortho dept. Instead of hiring more nurses to make sure they are adequately staffed, they formed this unit to cover.