Making them sit in a room for hours at a time with no work, monitoring them for any activity they use to distract themselves so you can use it to fire them - that's basically abusive, verging on mental torture. The company being under contract is no excuse for abusive conduct.
Have you noticed the word parasites in my original post? As a post communist regime company in Eastern Europe half were communist party related nepotists, third were incompetent and 20% did medal of honor worthy deeds to try and do all the work there was. It was common for a lot of people to come to work just to drink coffee and do nothing but gossip. They just took away the coffee and the gossip.
So the problem is the regulatory situation that the company was in, this weird contract that required you to keep a certain number of people employed.
I'm sorry you felt you had to abuse people to achieve your business goals. This would not be acceptable in my country, but then neither would you be bound to keep a certain number of people employed.
