Several decades ago, I worked at a company where there wasn't much difference between employees and contractors. You could work alongside someone and never knew without asking. Both groups would work on projects for decades together, until one day it all changed.
Due to some lawsuits regarding nonpayment of income taxes the government got involved. All of a sudden the distinction became important.
Word came down from on high that no one could be a consultant for more than five years. Which, caused some scrambling in management. How to replace these people who each had more than a decade of information specific to the system?
Someone had the brilliant idea of replacing these people with themselves. For example, Vince the consultant would be replaced by Vince the employee. From management's point of view, it was a win-win. The only fly in the ointment was that the hourly rate for a consultant was, in some cases, significantly higher than that of an employee.
There was, however, a way around this. The manager could on a case-by-case basis could for a limited period of time request a salary that was much higher as an incentive to join the company. This salary would be in effect until the new employee's next performance evaluation.
Management's plan was put in place and a number of consultants converted into employees. The odd thing was that one manager had all of their consultants convert into employees. When he was asked about it, he made a few comments about being a better manager and salesperson.
The year passed, as years do, which means the time of annual reviews was upon the department, again. This also meant that there were a number of former consultants who were being far beyond their pay grades.
Rather than just come out and say that there would be people whose salaries would be cut managers decided to put a positive spin on things.
Just as mass firings became layoffs, which later became downsizing a new way of describing reality was needed. It took several days, but they came up with a fresh way to describe what would happen. Instead of pay cuts or salary cuts, the Newspeak would be “Negative Raises.” The logic was that “raises” were a good thing. After all, who would complain about getting a raise?
Turns out that a number of people complained. It also turns out that even if you were a better manager and salesperson, you couldn't sell this. In fact, telling people that they should consider themselves lucky, because “some people didn't get any raise at all” only made things worse.
In the end, the only people who stayed on were just riding out the time to retirement, lazy or were too green to know any better. But, management did get their bonuses for reducing costs.