From an business uptime perspective, forced "downtime" of employees through vacation is actually a good way to force the creation of backup systems for business process.
I also recall hearing at some point in time that a lot of financial institutions forced certain people to take time off,as a means to detect embezzling. I'm not sure if that's true or not.
Not only is that practiced, it's the law.
This makes the whole inustial and coorporate sector grind to a halt. A lot of factories literally shut down for a few weeks.
Fortunately, it is rather well coordinated.
What does everyone think?
Thus why many employers don't do training other than the bare minimum - why train someone who might use the training to go elsewhere. This is the "keep them dumb and stupid" approach to employee retention.
Seems kind of silly to me. If your better employees regularly leave your company, than you probably have more deeply-rooted organizational problems that need fixing.
Or, when combined with a minimal vacation time bucket, forced vacation makes sure your employees will be there when you want them to be.
I know an auditor at a Big 4 accounting firm. The employees in her office are forced to take some vacation time during the slow time of the year. That way it burns down vacation time that they could otherwise be using during crunch time and causing short-staffing.