It wasn’t the employees who killed the “Company Man”. It was the companies themselves. Corporations value short term profit above all else, including long term stability. This means that the older, higher paid employees are a liability, not a benefit. So, they get shown the door the first time the line doesn’t go up. Loyalty is a two way street. If the company isn’t loyal to it’s employees, the employees won’t be loyal to the company. Once people woke up to the fact that the corporations are fully mercenary about employment, it was a natural reaction for the employees to become mercenary as well.

This is also why every company pushes bullshit about “we’re a family”. It’s a bald faced lie to sucker gullible employees into thinking that the company wouldn’t gut them and sell their organs at the first sign of that making a quick buck.

Every worker should watch this video at least once. It was speaking to designers, but is applicable everywhere.

Corporations value short term profit above all else, including long term stability.

It didn’t used to be this way. I mean, all Corporations need to be profitable, of course, and the successful ones are more profitable. But using Shareholder Value as the main (perhaps only) metric for decisions didn’t really come around until the 80’s and Jack Welch at GE started talking about it extensively.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

This focus on shareholder value exclusively also implies that Corporations do not have any responsibility to anyone except its shareholders. You can see the effects of this philosophy even today, where Republicans attack corporate ESG initiatives because they feel that they undermine this commitment to increasing shareholder value. It even extends to the Twitter mess: Twitter’s board felt they had to force the sale to Musk at the inflated price he offered because it was so much higher than the company was objectively worth, and would be the best return for its shareholders, even though they probably knew he would end up wrecking the company (and screwing over employees). They felt they could only make decisions for the benefit of shareholders, and not employees or users.