The people being harrassed had been hired by a public service, not a company succumbing to the cult of "shareholder value" as the sole metric of a company's worth.

I didn't say I agreed with the harassment. I said that firing someone to improve return on investment is a perfectly acceptable reason to fire someone.

You said that they signed up to a shareholder value driven organisations, so should accept layoffs as part of such a company, but they didn't join a private company, they joined a public service that was later privatised.

Public vs private shouldn't matter here. Public institutions exist to provide services to taxpayers. Taxpayer money should be put to the highest and best use. If the job of some government employee is no longer the highest and best use of that taxpayer money, they should be let go. Taxpayers have no obligation to pay people indefinitely for labor that they no longer need or value.

taxpayers ~= shareholders