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Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.

It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.

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> Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs.

I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.

The problem is there will always be country or states that won't follow such rule. And M$ will figure out how to hire people there...

In some places, if an employee is made redundant the employer is barred from filling the same position for a period of time.

Enforceability is a problem; it's always been trivial to re-write a job description.

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