I hate that policy. Sometimes I think it's used as a scare tactic for those left behind.

I've only worked one place where I felt that the managers used this on a regular basis. I saw them let go entire teams of call center workers. They would tell them at the beginning of their shift their team had been discontinued. If there were teams short on workers, they might offer some of them a position on another team, but they had to make a decision on the spot, and some of the workers depended on buses, taxis or family or friends to get to work and just couldn't make a decision like that on the spot. I got out of there as soon as I could.

Every week another team was, "disappeared" over a period of a couple months. It slowed down by the time I left, but pretty much everyone there worried about when they were going to be fired.