[ethbr1]

This is part of the K-shaped economy.

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)

[gametorch]

Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.

[ethbr1]

Not treating people like that requires a fundamental move away from capitalist primacy in the US.

You're barking up the wrong tree if you're expecting it to be corporation-initiated.