"On the one hand, the doctrine of at-will employment has been heavily criticized for its severe harshness upon employees.[39] It has also been criticized as predicated upon flawed assumptions about the inherent distribution of power and information in the employee-employer relationship.[40] On the other hand, conservative scholars in the field of law and economics such as Professors Richard A. Epstein[41] and Richard Posner[42] credit employment at will as a major factor underlying the strength of the U.S. economy. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment#Controversy

Well I'm certainly not a conservative.

I think the second point is true. An at-will contract (or lack thereof) is essentially skewed towards the free will of the employer in a way that is massively to the detriment, as these cuts prove, to that of the employee.

At will might be the employment norm in America, but assuming a sizeable number of Nokia's workers are actually Finnish where they have far stronger employment laws, I would wonder whether this is all even legal.

If we're being bitchy over definitions, then do you even know what the definition of "industrial action" is? Because it's orthogonal to whether or not the firings were legal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_action