Was firing an over-reaction?

Employers do not, generally, have a problem with their freedoms being suppressed by their employees. There is a huge power gap there, which shows in contract negotiation as well as at other times, ruining the libertarian fantasy of 'if it's in the contract it must have been freely agreed upon without coercion'.

And employers that exploit their employees really *do* exist. At the extreme end they enslave their employees and work them to death. At the less extreme end they merely ignore their employees requests regarding unimportant matters like health and safety until those employees turn to the greater power of the state to force them to do so. This happens frequently, whenever a sufficiently ethically dubious employer thinks it can get away with it and thinks the employee will not jump jobs as a result. (Heck, if you stay in one job for long enough, the employer may consider that it can do this even though you are in a position with normally high mobility. My previous employer did, repeatedly, and if it wasn't for the existence of employment legislation would quite happily have worked me until I was crippled by RSI and forced to resign, rather than pay much less than one month's pay to me on a keyboard that would fix the problem. Heck, they did that to previous employees. Nobody said that employers' abuse of employees is necessarily *rational* -- in that case, it was founded in a pathological fear of any capital expenditure whatsoever. And don't say "employers who think like that will go bust", this is not so if sufficiently many employers think like that, *or* if it's shared by only part of the management chain in a larger company.)