they are like testing the waters with the 60yo, then they can apply it to other employees.

If I had to guess, I'd say we're way past the "testing" stage and doing this at industrial scale. This just happened to be the kind of egregious implementation of policy that trickles into the news cycle.

For every Kurt Kromm, I'll bet there's a dozen employees fired due parking tickets or misentered vacation or failure to meet some impossible milestone in they're performance plans. More traditional and acceptable routes for firings.

It's worse without unions, but setting expectations beyond capacity and pointing a camera at points of failure is key to a good turnover rate.

If you're looking at 300-400% turnover then you don't really end up with that sort of issue in the first place.