I have no idea how other people put up with this shit.
At the top-level, you know people are not slackers. They want to do their best to contribute. It is true that goals are not always aligned, etc.
In the modern world, it seems we have lost our humanity. This story, the United airlines story, and so many examples. I don't think things are worse off than they were in the dark ages of course. But I think we don't have an excuse to be jerks anymore - partly because as a society we have abundance or sorts. Not just pointing fingers at Amazon and United, but collectively, as a society, we need to clean up our act soon or I fear things will get worse and worse for everyone (rich and poor).
The thing that scares me is if this doesn't backfire and affect the bottom line, it could set a precedent elsewhere. With no real unions to speak of in many places (and in some cases, legislation that makes forming unions harder) it will be hard to fight back against.
Where I work if you're sick or a kid is sick, that means work from home via VPN, just like if they called you for an emergency at 2am except its 2pm. If you're not a total loser or slacker your boss won't expect much "work" especially if you're genuinely sick, but even if all you do is idle on instant messaging and reply to emails, they're getting at least some kind of value out of you more so than a sick day and if you accomplish anything, however slow, plus for the bean counters you're not logging a sick day. Actually burning an actual literal sick day frankly means you're going to baseball opening day or a job interview or you're in the terminal stages of your career so to speak (bad relationship with company or boss), or maybe you feel cheated out of vacation days so you pad mondays and fridays with more than 2/5th of sick days etc.
Obviously jobs or employers incompatible with VPN work are a different scenario.
Sick day in the 90s mean literally sick, like the flu, whereas in the 10s if I have the flu I just work from home very slowly and literal sick day means "go local professional sports team go" or similar unscheduled vacation.