This thread reeks of hindsight bias and know-it-all mentality. And it's sickening to read. Not uncommon when things like these happen unfortunately.
Some of you are so good at looking back and finding it so obvious how these layoffs during winter happened for the second time. Because it was so damn clear to see and anyone who didn't see it coming must be mentally retarded, right? Stop fooling yourselves. You did not know for certain it would happen, because none of us did.
Of course in hindsight it is all easy to explain and there are so many convenient explanations available to show how "easy" it was to see this coming.. no matter how much you believe you knew it was going to happen you actually did not know for sure. This is a perfect example of the hindsight bias. It's easy to criticize and find faults in someone's decision making after the outcome is known, and likewise also very easy to forget that when the decision was made the outcome was actually still unknown.
The truth is that even for the pilots in Norwegian this was surprising news. It did happen last year, but considering the explanations given it could all seem like a simple ****up by the crew planning department (which would not be a surprise), or a mere coincidence as new routes that were planned from the Euro-bases had their start-ups postponed leaving less work for the pilots. My point being that it would be just as easy to find logical explanations to the hypothetical scenario that no one was laid-off this winter as to the actual scenario that people will in fact be laid off.
So get off your high horses everyone, cut the crap, and show some respect to your fellow aviators. They could not know this was going to happen again, and neither could you. Telling someone they "should've known" and that they "deserve" to be laid off because of it is just being disrespectful and quite frankly, stupid.