After All That Nastiness, This Is Relatively Cheerful
The Empress is writing:

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The story takes place in a parallel world where corporations simply execute unneeded or incompetent employees instead of laying them off....

It's a satire, of course. Not many yucks, but plenty of sneers and malevolent chortles.

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Watch out; some companies might get ideas. But they're not profitable:

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The basic idea of COLI is that a company buys life insurance policies, payable to the firm, to ensure against the economic loss occasioned to the firm when an employee dies. The employee dies; the company gets the benefits....

Now, the policies might be dreadful PR, and thus a bad idea. But I don't see how they're particularly immoral....

Mark Kleiman says that the reason it's bad is that it gives companies an interest in their employees death. But actually, I don't think it does in any meaningful sense....

When you're insuring a pool [of employees], you can't gain economic benefit from raising the number of deaths in the population. Why? Because if an abnormal number of people die, the insurance company will notice. If you seem to be causing the deaths, either by running an unsafe workplace or hiring from an especially risky pool...the insurance company will either stop writing the policy, or they will require you to take action. And they'll also raise your rates because you're a high risk client. Those rates will be at least the economic cost of covering your new, riskier insurance pool. In other words, any money you make from encouraging your employees to die will be paid to the insurance company as premiums to cover their higher risk of dying.

That doesn't even take into account the liability and health insurance costs you would incur if you started trying to kill your employees.

So, no, I don't think it gives a company an interest in their employees' deaths. In fact, a company that's looking out for its economic interests will want their employees deaths to vary right within the normal actuarial range....

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And, in case there was any doubt, check this out:

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The basics of economics clearly point out that pollution is an externality that will eventually catch up with its producers. If you kill your employees and customers, you're bound to go bankrupt.

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So, yes, the Empress is writing satire. Use suspension of disbelief and all that stuff. And think of the Monty Python architect sketch:

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Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...

Client 1: Excuse me.

Mr. Wiggin: Yes?

Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?

Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.

Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?

Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?

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I'm gonna have bad dreams about ants again, I bet...