> apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case.

The US law isn't translated directly to other countries, but every country allows companies to do layoffs. They just have different requirements for including someone in a layoff.

In some countries the requirements are as minimal as saying that there's not enough work for the person to do. It's basically the same thing with extra steps.

The real difference is requirements for notice periods or severance. Note that in tech companies like Oracle they're giving severance as well.

The other side of this debate is that companies in the United States are much less resistant to hiring people when they know it's easy to scale back later. In our European offices we had to be much more cautious about hiring because the managers in our various European offices were afraid of getting stuck with a bad hire for a long or costly notice period. They also had a lot of games with "trial period" work that I don't fully remember, but I can think of several trial period employees who were dismissed because they were borderline and their managers didn't want to take the risk of having them past the period where letting them go was easy.