It is not generous everywhere. In the Netherlands you get 1/6 salary for every 6 months, so only two months salary if you’ve been at the company for six years.

talk to your laywer. there is probably some mistake in your paperwork or something that's not so clear or maybe the wrong people were left out/included in the process. European work laws can be complicated and not all hr people are on top of everything.

Helped me a lot a few years back and got me from "you are fired without severance" to "you are paid for six more months, you don't have to come in and here is half a year's pay in severance". Companies want to shock you into submission, hand it to an external party, lean back end enjoy.

I haven't been laid off myself, fortunately, just relaying the information that was given by the company I worked for. That is the standard policy and is quite different from "months of work enshrined in law" as the parent comment suggested.

> Having to spend half your available income for things that are automatically taken on your salary in Europe is _the_ major reason Americans are paid considerably more, with "US tech companies and VCs have so much money they don't give a damn about salary" as a close second.

I don’t think you can name many things here that the American tech workers have to spend on, that are included in typical European social benefits package. For example, if you were thinking about healthcare, you would be very wrong, as American tech workers spend very small fraction of their pay on healthcare, smaller than a typical European tech worker.

Health care for my family of four is $5000/yr at my employee, although that’s pre-tax. If I were single it would be free. This covers essentially everything, I’ve had $10s of thousands of surgery for which I paid nothing myself. I never have to wait for medical care, I can just go same day whenever I want. Prescriptions cost me $0.

Health care in the US is only expensive if you are poor and unemployed, sad to say.

> Having to spend half your available income for things that are automatically taken on your salary in Europe is _the_ major reason Americans are paid considerably more

Are you thinking of anything beyond healthcare? Youre correct that salaries and GDP are difficult to compare, but US disposable income pc is dramatically higher than almost anywhere in Europe, with the couple exceptions being tiny enclaves like Luxembourg or petrostates like Norway. Subtracting healthcare spending doesn't come close to closing the gap btwn the US and eg France.

And this isn't explicable by retirement either, as Actual Individual Consumption is also dramatically higher in the US.

Hell, I'm not even sure your hypothesis makes sense at first glance. If the salary difference was simply a matter of shifting govt spending into the personal ledger, wouldn't pretax incomes be as high in Europe? After all, much of the layoffs we're talking about are high-income enough that the employees would surely be net-payers in any mildly progressive tax system.