Yeah, they have to fire him and then hire someone else. That costs time and money. Then he can make some noise about it and get media attention on his firing.
If this happens enough times, perhaps corporations may be incentivized to change how they do things.
This is why, if we software folks were going to organize so we could do things like effectively support less-fortunate workers, the time to do it was any point in the last ~8 years when times were good. Oh well, maybe next boom. We'll have little ability to affect corporate and government behavior in this downturn.