>Putting a lot of restrictions on a company that does layoffs creates a perverse incentive to fire these people explicitly instead of giving them a gentle landing with a layoff. You would see far more people fired instead of "laid off".

Given that we long since decoupled terminations for being based on performance, I'd rather employers just be honest.

But they won't do that because they don't want any risk of lawsuits. Even if they are truly low performing, firing a pregnant woman or someone who happens to be an outlier race in the company is just too easy a setup for scrutiny. I've seen plenty of those kinds of people mixed up in these layoffs as well.