@Neil
If you already knew that companies exist to make money, why did you act as if they don't? Twice? Anything that Yahoo can do to make more profit, within the limit of the law, they should do. $200m profit is not good enough if you can make $220m. Or $201m. Or $200m and one cent. Companies exist to make profit, morality is for charities and individuals.
Let's look at it from the other end. Assuming that the average US salary is $50,000 and ignoring non-wage labour costs, should Yahoo really forgo their profit in order to employ 4,000 currently unemployed people to count paperclips? Don't forget, if your answer is 'no', that's 4,000 people suffering like our 1,000 here. Perhaps zero profit is going too far. How about 2,000 people, so Yahoo still has $100m left over? 500? Shove morality into business decisions and you end up with exactly this kind of nonsense.
The employees have already received their reward for making the company what it is: they were paid an agreed wage or salary for the amount of time they worked, and may receive redundancy payments. Of course they'll suffer. If they weren't made redundant, the shareholders would suffer. When the 1,000 workers were employed, the people who would have got the job instead had they not applied suffered. By writing posts on El Reg instead of doing volunteer work you and I cause suffering to old people or starving Africans or homeless cats or whatever. Suffering is inescapable, but it is not a zero-sum game. What history and science has taught us is that suffering is best reduced by people pursuing their own rational self-interest, and that the best way to increase it is to hand over that responsibility to someone or something else.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
