But this is not as far fetched as your story of a company agreeing to mass redundancies of skilled workers at the request of its contractor...
You must work with some very nice people up there on the 15th floor. I don't. I work in the IT industry, consulting to major corporations.
While working for "a very large Australian Bank" not so many years ago (say, 2005...) the staff were informed that the Bank would begin a massive (and mega-expensive) project to "re-in-source" their IT systems. The reason given was ".. it is evident that we have lost control over our IT strategic direction and operational capability..."
What Sunfish was saying, in other words. I'm not going to embarrass him (or me...) by naming either of the organisations, but I know exactly which one he was in, and he will know exactly which one I was in :-)
Just to amuse you, I could go further and say that, last time I looked, all of the IT services for a large Australian airline are provided by the same organisation. Which airline? Nope: won't say.
I've been in IT 30 years, give-or-take. It has taken the major corporations a very long time to figure out that "out-sourcing" is almost always a bad idea. It's not a complicated calculation: you can do it on the back of a beer coaster... "If you remove an activity from our business and move it to another business: that has to do the same job, plus account for that job in detail so they can send us a bill, plus buy a whole lot of expensive insurance which we do not need in case they make a mistake, plus make a profit, then either it will cost us more or they will do less."
Which is what we told them, 20 years ago. Which is what they're now "discovering", roughly at the time when the people who decided to outsource in the first place retire. Which is why Sunfish said you have to lobotomise the customer...