It also is in the company's advantage for 1 person to leave and now give the other 9 the work of 10 and push them to maintain productivity. Now they're saving 100K per year.
I had a previous company do that to a department that had 40 employees, and three years later it had 5 employees (a couple of layoffs, but mostly steady attrition with no hiring to replace them).
Saved them a ton of money in the short term. But the department also stopped being able to do anything but be in "keep the lights on" mode, almost entirely maintenance and very little new feature development, and they also lost two major clients in the process as well as they couldn't keep up with SLAs, and thus their revenue ended up dropping by several million dollars a year, so I'm not sure if they really saved money in the end.
This is the issue with letting COLA types of pay increases lapse, then that employer may fall out of favor, be known to not treat people right and it could steamroll to where they can't get talent.
That's probably true, but in this company's case, it was because they had a hiring freeze for most of that three years, and a "la la la la I can't hear you" policy to middle management that begged to let them hire more people after that.
Or the few times they did allow it, about 2x more people left than they approved to be hired during that time period so the employee count still went down.
