Dead wood is a great way to put that and I say that because we have or had a manager for everything around here. If we had a nut and bolt dept. we had a manager for that, if we have a rag dept. we had a manager for that, if we needed to know how many plastic ties we had we had a manager for that to, this is a bit extreme but the mentality is the same. When I start with this company I always thought it was over staffed, or the tree was to heavy up top and heard one time that we had 1 boss for 3 employees.
Sounds like they just needed an excuse to clean house of some over paid dead wood, I'll bet there is already a stack of applications on the HR managers desk and those spots will be filled quickly with much lower pay scales in place.