Some 40 million U.S. workers lost jobs in the last recession. Now many are working again – but still marked by the experience.

Job loss is about much more than money, but let’s start there.

A Federal Reserve study last year found that 47% of American adults could not handle an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money or selling something.

One stroke of bad luck can be catastrophic even for those who have jobs. Losing the paycheck is even worse. Just a few weeks without one can put them in a deep hole from which they may never emerge.

Worse, most people laid off in a recession almost never recover completely.

New UCLA research, reported in the Wall Street Journal, shows a significant pay gap even years later. Many laid-off workers earn 15-20% less than their peers even 10-20 years later.

Recessionary layoff victims have lower rates of homeownership and poorer health.

Their children are make lower grades and are less likely to attend college. Laid-off workers are more vulnerable to drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness and suicide.

For men, the average lifespan is 12-18 months shorter.

Again, all this is true even for those who find new jobs when the economy recovers.

Today, in a supposedly strong job market, about 14 million are still jobless or working part-time for lack of a full-time opportunity.

And that doesn’t count the millions more who left the labor force to retire, work off the books, go on disability or live with relatives.

The scars aren’t just on individuals. The whole U.S. economy bears them.

In the very big picture, no nation’s economy can grow without two critical components. It has to 1) add more workers, or 2) make existing workers more productive, or some combination of both.

Casting workers aside might help individual companies. On a national scale, though, it is counterproductive because unemployed and underemployed workers reduce their consumption.

This, I think, may explain the sluggish growth we’ve seen since the recession ended. We can bring in robots to build stuff – but who will buy it?

Two decades of globalization and so-called “free” trade taught executives the wrong lesson. They stopped seeing workers as valuable resources and started thinking of them as interchangeable parts.

Foreign workers may be cheaper, but do they contribute to U.S. consumption? Not by much. When businesses fire American workers, they also fire American consumers.

We’ve seen how well that worked. Time to try a different way.

Patrick Watson is an Austin-based financial writer. Follow him on Twitter @PatrickW

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