Re: your last paragraph, I feel like that's symptomatic of a change in the relationship between capital and labor that has happened to some extent at every level of the market.
Companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in the wellbeing or value of individual workers, instead treating workers as fungible assets to minimize the cost of which serve as solutions to current (rather than long-term) problems. We see this with the near-universal embracement of short-staffing in service-level jobs, lack of career mobility from starting positions, and even in the tech industry with the expectation that you usually have to switch companies to get a raise.
Companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in the wellbeing or value of individual workers, instead treating workers as fungible assets to minimize the cost of which serve as solutions to current (rather than long-term) problems. We see this with the near-universal embracement of short-staffing in service-level jobs, lack of career mobility from starting positions, and even in the tech industry with the expectation that you usually have to switch companies to get a raise.