I’m pretty sure that if you need some stock to grow in order to support your children, then your influence on a public company is virtually irrelevant.

You have a good point on my individual control of a public company is quite small. Luckily, basically every single other stockholder has the same reason for owning the stock as me- making money.

There is basically no risk that a different group of stockholders with more voting power want to run it as a public works jobs program

Yet the fact that shareholders want to get richer doesn’t mean that laying off people when a company is drowning in money is ethically right.

If you want to look at it simply in terms of ethics, I'm not sure layoffs are always unethical, even if the company is profitable.

I do think it is unethical to jerk people around (e.g. new hires), but I think generous severance goes a long way towards addressing this.