A couple of economists verified the obvious, when people are laid off they basically don't recover ...(oh, financially of course!).

In Long-Term Earnings Losses due to Mass Layoffs During the 1982 Recession: An Analysis Using U.S. Administrative Data from 1974 to 2004 (this is a preliminary paper), Researchers Wachter, Song & Manchester discover workers after 15-20 years still are not earning income at the level they were before being canned.

This has potentially important implications for the costs of economic adjustment in the U.S. economy. In particular, while the ability to fire ‘at will’ may benefit adjustment in the labor market as a whole, the costs in terms of lost productivity and earnings of individual workers may be much higher than typical replacement rates of unemployment insurance or other programs designed to smooth temporary earnings fluctuations.