A redundancy exercise is best done quickly in one clean cut which shortens the pain of those affected and enables those left to move forward with some certainty, dragging it out makes all the employees suffer and low morale affects performance and customer experience.
The fact that more redundancies appear to be coming so soon after the first suggests either:
1. They got the numbers wrong first go.
2. Projections going forward are now worse than the original ones.
3. Circumstances have changed, possibly expected funding won’t now be available or a high level decision has been made to downsize.
With COVID - 19 cases in India and Brazil still climbing exponentially, resurgences being seen in the USA and Australia after lockdowns were eased and delays in allowing travel bubbles from countries such as Thailand, the return of mass air travel in the near term is very unlikely.
Emirates have been caught with the wrong fleet for the current situation, the aircraft are just too big. The neighbouring two can each string some sort of network together using A320s and B787s but EK don’t have that option. The current circumstances could not have been foreseen and the company was simply wrong place/ wrong time.
Going forward, an all B787 fleet comprising the -8/9/10 models could be an option while the airline gradually rebuilds itself.