Increasingly, we have larger corporations eating everything, including other companies, leaving consumers with fewer choices. In recent years there has finally been some pushback from the government—antitrust was more or less nonexistent ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist in 2001—but it remains to be seen whether this will end with more than just another wrist slap, and whether the new administration will roll back even the small progress made. When we have more competition, more economic choices, more companies, indeed more smaller companies owned by individuals rather than by collectives of fund managers (effectively a tragedy of the commons), we're more likely to have people in power who do care, and the people who don't care have to compete against the people who do, which incentivizes caring. On the other hand, corporate consolidation leads to a small number of people controlling everything, who care about nothing but profit.
At the lower levels, below the C-suite (with their golden parachutes rewarded regardless of success or failure), job insecurity has become a fact of life for everyone. The epitome of this situation is the so-called "gig economy", in which millions of people don't even have permanent employment or hours (or health insurance, for that matter) but are forced to live day-to-day with tenuous connections to giant corporations and the odd jobs those corporations may throw their way. Even people who do have full-time jobs can be tossed away unceremoniously like so much trash at any time in mass layoffs, for any reason or no reason. The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them. There was a time, many decades ago, when companies were more like families, felt some community responsibility, and an individual could work for the same company their entire career and retire there. The incentives were more aligned to caring about your job; it was similar to caring about your own family.
The way that humans behave depends crucially on the environment: place them in a healthy, supportive situation, and they'll tend to behave well; place them in a hostile situation, a war of all against all, and they'll tend to behave badly. We need to arrange our society intentionally so that the incentives are aligned for mutual benefit and caring. We primates are inherently imitative.
So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?
I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?
This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting" (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and no more).
I'm a bit puzzled about how this reply is supposed to relate to or add to my comment. For example, I already said, "The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them."
What I don't see in the reply is any kind of contextual or critical analysis. You speak as if this is simply an immutable law of nature rather than a product of our contemporary economy. "You're not supposed to take work personally." Where do you think this "principle" comes from? I agree that a lot of people say it, and indeed that it's a rational reaction to the economic circumstances. But must it be this way, and why? And if so, what do you expect to be the outcome, aside from animus and anomie? Is it a good way for us to live together, forever?
I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how ridiculous this was. If the company was going to lay you off, they never gave you any notice at all. You were just told not to come to work the next day.
So this is not just about current economic circumstances. It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a long time.
Why do you think that was? Expectations don't just arise out of nothing. In 1974, there was more job security and less frequent layoffs.
> I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how ridiculous this was.
Alternatively, it wasn't originally ridiculous, but the economic conditions slowly changed to make it ridiculous.
> It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a long time.
Of course things didn't change overnight. I never said they did.
You should care about the people whose lives are affected by the result of your work at the very least.
If you work in property management, for instance, you shouldn't repeatedly bill your tenants after charges are due then accuse them of late payment. Ditto for double-billing them for a month and doing the same anyway... if these bogus "late payments" end up on one's rental history then it's a lot of work to fix even for a completely honest person that's never paid a bill late in their life.
Or, if you're a doctor, you should probably read a patient's blood test results correctly so that you don't prescribe them the wrong medicine or tell them to take an incorrect supplement. If you have somebody take the wrong chemicals because you can't read a piece of paper then bad things could happen to them.
I could go on and on and on but the bottom line is that you need to give at least an iota of a shit when your fellow people are at the mercy of the quality of your work. Missing a topping on a sandwich is whatever but messing with somebody's finances, shelter, or health out of lazy defiance is outright sociopathy. The fact that you don't like your boss is your problem; stick it to your employer on your own time.