The more important angle here isn't pitting shareholders against employees, it's keeping an eye on the ball: The ultimate purpose of a company isn't employing t

The more important angle here isn't pitting shareholders against employees, it's keeping an eye on the ball: The ultimate purpose of a company isn't employing the highest possible number of employees, it's providing a product or a service to customers. If an employee isn't contributing to providing that product or service (even through no fault of their own), both parties are (ultimately, in the long term) better off if there are lay-offs. The longer an employee that isn't creating value is kept around, the harder it will be for him to get another job - not the mention the impact on morale not actually doing anything useful has. Of course, I don't mean to imply that it's doing the employee a favour to lay them off - but the choice typically isn't between business as usual or mass lay-offs for the fun of it, it's between high probability of failure and a lower probability of failure (with a shot at turning the business around). Forcing shareholders to prop up a failing business to save a few jobs for a short time is more than a little counter-productive.