From what I saw in the UK, the Jan 2023 layoffs (the 12k) had a lot of people redeployed. Of the 3 people I knew personally impacted by it, 2 were redeployed elsewhere in the business (1 eng, 1 HR). I know it happened extensively in at least one other country too.

A company that plans ahead a little can also relocate top talent BEFORE the layoff rounds start, and even relocate people they want to get rid of TO the part of the or where layoffs are coming.

I'm sure some orgs stealthily start planning this months if not years ahead of such events, especially if they identify that they have unproductive people on board that are difficult to fire the regular way (like European employees, where regulations makes it harder to fire people than in the US).

Are there (m)any countries where they can't pay off an employee to resign?

I don't know of any countries where you're not allowed to make an offer.

But if you offer packages to people who are underqualified or underperforming for the terms they currently enjoy, it may require a very high sum to make them sign it.

And in markets where every job basically come with the same terms as academic tenure, people will be less worried that the company will play hardball and just fire them without compensation if the package is refused.

However, most if not all European countries allow layoffs, even though the terms of the layoffs may have to be approved by the union in a few places, or at least have the selection criteria for who gets laid off made public.

And if some department can be stuffed full of all underperformers, it can serve as a convenient proxy for performance to lay off mostly from that department, based on lack of profitability there.

I'm sure this happens in the US, too, at least if it turns out that a higher fraction of those on the way out belong to some protected identity group, which may easily be the case in tech companies where essential developers are disproportionality male and/or asian/white, while various support staff, account managers etc are recruited from a more diverse pool.

this is a very weird claim. big tech companies regularly fire employees in Europe for low performance, they have entire elaborate machinery for it.

They do. And in some countries it's even about as easy as in the US. I wasn't granular enough.

_Some_ countries in Europe have very strong worker protection laws, probably correlated to trade union participation rate:

   https://qery.no/trade-unions-worldwide/

For instance, if you want to do layoffs in Sweden, you probably have to coordinate it with union representatives before even making it public. Firing is even harder.

Another factor that may also apply to the US, is that if the people you want to get rid of disproportionally belong to some demographic groups or other identity groups, have medical conditions or have participated in disruptive activism, etc, claiming that they are fired for bad performance (even if true) makes the risk of bad press significantly worse.

Exactly what traits risk come with such risks may very from place to place.

I also personally knew about 9 people affected in the UK. Of those, only one managed to find another team before the end of the garden leave.

incorrect, almost everyone (>>90%) in the UK that was made redundant left the company.

there were a very small number of exceptions and the process was made deliberately hard/impossible.

Looks more like last years Jan layoffs. Laptops restarting & people getting locked out.