You are missing a key point: scale of lay offs. Of course an employer can pull this off for a handful of employees, but not for a significant percentage of the

You are missing a key point: scale of lay offs. Of course an employer can pull this off for a handful of employees, but not for a significant percentage of their workforce. If your claim was right, no employer would had paid severance for layoffs. They would just give a cause to every one laid off. Not that hard to come up with bs metrics.