They're not quite the same, those two terms have taken on different meanings. "Fired" has come to mean "for cause", and "laid off" has come to mean "not for cause".
My hunch is that the evolution was driven by executives, probably in the 70s and 80s, that didn’t want to say they were firing people in order to make more money.
In other words the same dynamic that now leads to ‘impacted’.
Some members of my family (back in the day) used to be laid off from positions seasonally, and were then rehired the next year.
I suspect that in its early versions, it referred more to the notion that "we won't have any more work until the spring, so we'll see you then."
I don't know its etymology or when it might have been coopted by employers who didn't intend to rehire, but I suspect its intent is to signal that there's no ill will between the employer and the employee, and that it WOULD rehire those impacted persons in the future.
I'm not as sure that it means anything so specific now.
Manufacturing can still work like this (and maybe other industries?). You're laid off every now and then, if work slows down, but with the expectation (possibly contractually—many of these have unions) that you'll be brought back when work picks back up. AFAIK they can collect unemployment during the lay-off, so it's better than being kept on with much-reduced hours.
In the UK they have the term "redundancy" (as in "your position has been made redundant"). Can't see that term catching on in the US but it does cover the use of "laid off" to mean "the company chose to eliminate the position I worked in rather than choosing to get rid of me as a person", and thus may carry less stigma.
It’s the opposite: they started out distinct, but then, by the euphemism treadmill, became used interchangeably.
And if you go back even further it meant something even milder, like furloughed or terminated with the intent to rehire when expected business picks up.
It depends on the listener's relationship with the person in question.
If you're on the receiving end, then that model and the act done to you are irrelevant.
If someone is applying for a job and they tell you "I was fired from my last job" vs "I was laid off from my last job", that changes your perspective on them.
Having terms that distinguish whether or not it's "for cause" are a useful language feature.
A furloughed employee has the expectation that employment can resume with the company, while a laid off employee does not. This is important for tax and other legal considerations.
This very much depends on where you are. For example in the UK a lay off technically means being told to stay at home because there isn't enough work [1], although it's often used these days to mean "fired without cause", i.e. the American usage of lay off has become more common and it has simultaneously became common to use the term "furlough" to describe layoffs during the pandemic.
