Really need the government to start heavily penalizing companies who lay people off. Layoffs can't be a tool for a company to get ahead financially. We're ruining lives and triggering suicides with these layoffs.
I think the approach of things like the WARN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...) act are more plausible. Use legislation to make the workforce more informed, resilient and ahead-of layoffs. You don't want mass layoffs crippling your economy because people are unable to plan.
It's a direct consequence of the WARN act that most tech layoffs have extremely generous severance.
What makes you think that's why most of these tech companies are laying people off?
the being laid off part itself takes a huge mental toll, regardless of material circumstances. There's a reason the mental health of phd candidates and a good chunk of white collar workers in nominally lucrative professions is in the gutter. The hire and fire hamster wheel is in itself completely pathological. The industry just has done a really fantastic job of marketing permanent insecurity and precarity as individual choice.
I agree that a lot of US companies have behaved very poorly and casually with people's lives.
I guess I just see stuff like health care as easy wins. The rest of it is trickier.
As for "someone has to pay for it", well we already are. We have the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world, also the highest rate of medical-related bankruptcies in the world and lowest life expectancy in the developed world. We are putting 6-12% of our paycheck into social security and will likely never see a payout when we need it. Different industrial sectors are getting hundreds of billions in subsidies. The military is getting trillions.
The money is there, we just need to have the will to spend it to everyone's benefit. But no, we'd rather set it on fire instead so the wrong people don't accidentally get helped.
To the point of the parent, in a lot of Europe it’s not so simple to just lay off some small portion of the company. It needs to be justified and a decent percentage, and employees are often entitled to some compensation (some severance) to offset the layoff.
Of course there are other ways to fire employees but those have their own rules.
Companies need to stop defining growth in terms of head count and instead in terms of revenue and profit and learn that just because you have access to money doesn't mean you should go on a hiring frenzy.