Many companies want to avoid reducing headcounts during the holiday season. Now, the aversion to those bad optics appears to be waning. According to new survey data, not only did a third of participating companies report they were preparing year-end layoffs, most also plan to hand out bonuses to executives.

This good for some and very bad for others news that will come in the next several weeks is another reflection of today’s tight labor market and economic uncertainty. Hiring rates remained consistently weak since May, and a growing list of companies recently announced sweeping job cuts, including Amazon, Target, UPS, and General Motors. Now it appears many other employers no longer feel they can delay similar staffing decreases until after the holidays. As a result, 31 percent of the 1,008 business leaders responding to a Resume.org poll said they planned to reduce their headcounts before December 31, with 57 percent of those layoffs to be completed before December 25.

That timing represents a break with recent history. Over the past decade or more, the effective use of social media platforms by laid-off workers to denounce year-end job cuts led many employers to delay those reductions until later.

Indeed, a report by executive outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas about mounting staff cuts in October noted that most businesses had stopped “announcing layoffs before the holidays fell away, a practice that seemed particularly cruel.” Because of that, it added, “the optics of announcing layoffs in the fourth quarter are particularly unfavorable.”

Or at least they were.

The anemic job market, and rising employer worries that the economy may be slowing have apparently shifted those views. Among the nearly one-third of companies surveyed by Resume.org that said they were planning year-end layoffs, 34 percent said “they definitely could have waited” until after the holiday season to carry those out. Another 40 percent said they probably could have delayed them, but chose otherwise.

That timing may not be the only way those businesses risk comparisons with Scrooge this year. Although 73 of participating managers said they consider undertaking layoffs during the holidays to be unethical, 82 percent reported executives in their companies will be getting year-end bonuses — even as coworkers received pink slips. Worse still, those notices will be the only thing many departing employees get.

A little over 40 percent of respondents said their laid-off workers won’t receive severance payments, either. In fact, 42 percent of participants said their businesses had chosen the holiday season to conduct layoffs as a means of avoiding handing out bonuses they would otherwise have to pay. Another 35 percent of managers said the timing would also spare them the costs of year-end employee paid time off.

Yet despite the understandable cries of “bah, humbug” from people learning of those moves, survey respondents made it clear the layoffs were primarily driven by pressing business concerns.

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