Making them sit in a room for hours at a time with no work, monitoring them for any activity they use to distract themselves so you can use it to fire them - that's basically abusive, verging on mental torture. The company being under contract is no excuse for abusive conduct.

Have you noticed the word parasites in my original post? As a post communist regime company in Eastern Europe half were communist party related nepotists, third were incompetent and 20% did medal of honor worthy deeds to try and do all the work there was. It was common for a lot of people to come to work just to drink coffee and do nothing but gossip. They just took away the coffee and the gossip.

So the problem is the regulatory situation that the company was in, this weird contract that required you to keep a certain number of people employed.

I'm sorry you felt you had to abuse people to achieve your business goals. This would not be acceptable in my country, but then neither would you be bound to keep a certain number of people employed.

In the U.S., an employee has the right to do the work they were hired to do, owing to the need for career development and currency.

In the US employees also get the right to get a pink slip and move the hell away. Which is not always the case in Europe. A friend currently had some trouble firing a very toxic person from his startup.

This is perverse situation where employee rights has gone berserk - in my country firing is hard because the government prefers not to pay the unemployment benefits it is obliged to so they always side with the employees in the private sector.

This is true in most European countries too.