You seem to be thinking in only the extremes "Drive people to suicide or go bankcrupt" and "Save the company, rainbows and unicorns".

Get laws changed to allow for the firing and since it would be done publicly you can make sure the populace would pressure the government to give aid to those fired.

According to other posts it is apparently not as hard to fire state employees as is made out in the article but it costs extra money, so company paids the one-time redundency costs, shit happens, company eats the cost (and maybe the gov loans / bails them out to cover this one time cost)

There is an entire range of possible options, presenting it as a black and white "Necessary evil to prevent $ABSOLUTE_WORST_CASE_SCENARIO" is justifying the worst behaviour.

Can you proof that they would have gone under without "letting go" of 20k people? The usual reason is "we need to look better to the stock market" and that's simply not a valid reason. The reality is that there's a big margin between "we are growing 20% per year!" and "we all go bust!" that most companies exist in. Sure, you won't be Wall Streets darling, if all you do is make a small profit every year, but if that's your main goal that's your problem, not something your employees should have to pay for.

The real solution is what companies did until early 90s: you cut your company in multiple parts and let those unprofitable bust (and try to sell them before they do). Market consolidation is the worst if you're a pro-market guy.