A 50 year old Intel employee might find it quite difficult to get a new job any time soon. Not to mention that where they live they'll have some other thousands ex-colleagues recently fired looking for similar type of jobs.
We're talking about thousands of people -- few of them will be highly sought after chip gurus. In fact obviously it's the less sought after ones that will be let go.
Add a recent mortgage, medical issue or kid at college and here goes their pension savings (or worse). Have the same layoff happen to their spouses near the same time (which it's not that rare), and they're pretty much screwed.
Really, it's as if people have no real world experience with these things...
Most of the UK's mobile industry was staffed by Ex Cellnet/BT who took Redundancy with some massive TAX free payouts - Senior Guys could get 5 figure payoffs and an extra 6 years on your pension.
The head of Vodafone in the UK was an example and as soem one said at his level they threw in a gold plated wheelbarrow for you to take your cash away in.
In most of the world, including large parts of western Europe, unless you're upper middle class and higher, it's either hand-to-mouth or smallish savings (nowhere near 30%).
I see via google that minimum wage in Germany is 1473 euros per month for a full time worker.
According to [1], food, housing, necessary household items, and public transportation look like they could reasonably total less than 800 euros per person. Add another 100 for having fun and for the occasional wardrobe expense, and you still get to save nearly 40%.
Having children ruins all of this, of course, but that's pretty easy to avoid.
That's nowhere near being able to save 30-40% of your pay, as the parent said. And Germans are some of the biggest savers in Europe. For places like France, crisis stricken "PIIGS" (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece etc) and especially the UK it's even worse.
Where do you have stats showing all of these job cuts will happen in the same location? Where are the stats that show when a person loses their job, their spouse is also likely to lose their job?
As for the same location: typically companies have so-called offices in a few locations --not individual people equally distributed around the country.
Plus, who said that their spouse is "equally likely to lose their job"? It's just an example of a thing that can happen, and does happen, not something that anyone claimed inevitable or "as likely"...