'They're freezing all raises and promotions': Upper management causes mass exodus during company meeting after announcing a hiring freeze

Imagine logging into a company meeting and hearing that everything's going great, only to then hear that upper management is now freezing all pending raises and promotions for the next two quarters. Something about that duality does not exactly make any sense. 

For starters, if targets have been met and overall performance across the team has exceeded expectations, then why can't any of the hard-working employees who are responsible for that performance be properly rewarded for all that effort and achievement? It sounds like upper management is benefiting from everyone else's hard work, so why can't the people who are actually responsible for that success enjoys the fruits of their labor?

It's upsetting when bosses looking to be more frugal within the business choose to let employee validation be on the chopping block. You can't expect to keep your employees happy by dangling the prospects of pizza parties and happy hours for the rest of the year. In this day and age, the vast majority of people I know would happily say no to all those perks if it meant that they could get a well-deserved raise instead. 

It seems that many of these employees were in the process of advocating for those raises, so it's not as if these promotions didn't happen because people weren't fighting for their worth. It just so happened that upper management vastly underestimated how frustrated these employees were with their salaries. So when that announcement was made in that company-wide meeting, plenty of those employees were already prepared to leave their jobs in the dust.