Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable. Job loss sucks. But it's pretty hyperbolic to say it's destroying peoples' lives. Particularly for skilled workers, finding a new job isn't all that far out.

>Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable.

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...

That depends if you can apply for redundancy you can lose the good people.

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.

This is largely a problem because of the pitiful savings rate in the US. If you've been saving 0% of your pay, being laid off at 50 is a disaster. If you've been saving 30-50%, this is likely to be a non-issue. Highly paid people in this country spend way too much of the money they earn.

Not only in the US, and not only because of being "highly paid" but "spending too much".

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%).

Which parts of western Europe?

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.

[1] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/berlin

Germans save around 9 to 11% of their disposable income, of which the average (post taxes) amount is around 25-30.000. This puts their annual savings to around $2200 to $3300.

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.

There's a large difference between being able to and choosing to save that much. I didn't say that it was the norm, but it's certainly possible if you have a near-median salary. Not doing so is a choice if you make a reasonably good salary, albeit an extremely common one that most people don't make consciously. It requires consciously tracking your spending, and being willing to forgo or at least cut back on some of the luxuries that have become much more common in the US and presumably Europe in the past 30 years (like eating out frequently). In return, you can get better financial security, even without an astronomical salary.

You paint a contrived scenario and then lament it. What is the purpose?

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?

It is not a contrived scenario. My dad was laid off 5 years before retirement and guess what? All his skills were working in the Intel organization and nobody is going to hire a senior manager in folsom a few years before retirement. Please try to be a bit more compassionate, it actually effects real people.

The "contrived" scenario is something that has been played again and again. as opposed to the "no worries" attitude.

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"...

20% of suicides are linked to unemployment.

you have "turtles all the way down" of bubble mentality