No one was fired. They were transferred to jobs at other locations for the same company.
Without more information, I don't know what having "jobs timed" means. It's not a common term.
If the paragraph refers to factory work, it would likely mean that the managers measured the amount of time it took to do a job - such as assemble a part. After collecting the data from several workers, they could calculate an average time to assemble that part. Following that, they could calculate how many workers would be needed to assembled a certain number of parts per day.