Tully, I think what you might be missing is that CEOs' duties run to their shareholders and not to their employees. I'm talking legal duties here. I would argue that treating employees well is good business and that a boss does shareholders no favors by shitting on employees, but there are occasionally times when it's necessary to cut back on workforce, and that can be for any number of reasons. If the end result is stemming losses or increasin profitability, then the CEO has done the company a service - including particularly the employees who remain with the company. I'd rather have a healthy company with fewer employees than a company that refuses to lay people off and then finds itself going under.
As far as shareholders are concerned, who do you think shareholders are? The biggest ones are not fat cats. The biggest ones are pension funds. In fact, I believe the single biggest shareholder in the country is CalPERS (see here:
http://www.calpers.ca.gov/index.jsp?bc=/about/home.xml). It invests the benefit and retirement money of the employees of the California State government. In other words, the workers of the country are also the owners of the businesses. That's what a 401(k) is. That's what pension funds are kept in. If you have a whole life insurance policy, the savings piece of it comes from investments.
This is all interlinked. We have a wonderfully interdependent economy, and each of our success is linked to everyone else's success.