Yes, it has. There are more legally protected classes than there were, and the laws were changed to make managers liable personally for wrongful termination.
If you're a first level manager at BigCo, the risk of getting sued outweighs the benefit to your career of getting rid of someone who needs to go.
I suspect that's why you see healthy companies doing a lot of relatively small layoffs - when your manager tells you a person on your team needs to go, you'll lay off the one you might have already fired in 1980. The result is the same, but it's a lot harder to sue over staff reductions than a firing for cause.
Startups are different, of course, because a company with only a handful of employees might go out of business if it has to carry one as dead weight.
If you're a first level manager at BigCo, the risk of getting sued outweighs the benefit to your career of getting rid of someone who needs to go.
I suspect that's why you see healthy companies doing a lot of relatively small layoffs - when your manager tells you a person on your team needs to go, you'll lay off the one you might have already fired in 1980. The result is the same, but it's a lot harder to sue over staff reductions than a firing for cause.
Startups are different, of course, because a company with only a handful of employees might go out of business if it has to carry one as dead weight.