'Try to pile on more work to increase your bonus? Not gonna happen...': Manager tries to put the work of 12 people onto a 7 person team to get a bigger bonus, supervisor won't let that happen

There's this trend that happens in every industry, across every workplace, where managers think they've come up with a clever and original new idea to increase profits. See, there are really only two ways to do this: Increase revenue or decrease expenses. However, increasing revenue is hard and takes effort and new ideas, so instead, they start looking at the bottom line. The first place they're going to look at at this point is staffing. Employees and labor are huge expenses, and management is always under the impression that workers are slacking and stealing time anyway, so cutting numbers here makes sense to them. Why employ more staff when you can just pay less to do the same amount of work anyway? Heck, while we're at it, let's see if we can get them to do more work, too. 

Management will collect their bonuses for a job well done in "increasing profits," and they might even stick around for a while after and look for more opportunities for short-term cost-cutting. By the time the truth materializes in the form of burnout and high turnover of staff, kickstarting an exodus of key staff and the institutional knowledge they take with them, those same managers will be long gone and on to the next company to do exactly the same thing, abandoning the old ship as unpatched holes that were long ignored for far too long at the sake of cutting costs causes it to sink behind them.

This supervisor and team leader weren't about to take this type of strategy lying down when their manager tried to push the workload from what had once been a team of 12 onto a team of seven. Their refusal to comply led to management not seeing the coveted bonuses they had been craving.