Or are you saying workers have become less engaged and less productive at work but maintain they're jobs? That might be plausible
Which was contrasted with engaged employees, who sharing in more of the profits, have an incentive to increase productivity — eg, by inventing a tooling improvement for the assembly line.
I think the overall point was employers are “penny wise, pound foolish” in that small productivity “gains” caused employees to disengage which is causing long-term slowdowns in improvements — improvements typically driven by employees stepping up and doing more.
Empowering line workers makes sense when there's growth and healthy margins to pursue. If the industry is mature or even shrinking then there's a heavier focus on cost cutting and metrics/Taylorism to maximize free cash flow and pay it out as dividends and stock buybacks.