I suspect you'll say the company owes them nothing in the US, which is true, but companies aren't/weren't always this stingy (or lying about financial strength), and you could have just said so without this strained analogy.
People earn money on capital. Software developers work on code within a company. The company makes tonne of money. Then lays off the very people who wrote the code. Why shouldn't the code writers get royalties for as long as their code is in use. Consider construction workers. They build our houses. Why shouldn't we pay also royalties to them for continuing to live in that house. What if the code changes, should the royalty still be paid? Why is capital treated differently than actual production artifacts prepared by people? The company should share its surplus with its previous employees and the house owners should pay their surplas to construction workers too. What if my house is engulfed in a fire caused by shortcircuit due to faulty work by electrician?
Ask LLM to connect this distinct ideas and it will help you understand how difficult problem it is to assign monetary value to our contributions.