The frequency at which I've seen comments paraphrased as "So you hate your work; welcome to life, now shut up and get back to it," is disheartening. I am surprised the number of people, even on HN, who see this mutual antagonism as not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that can and will sustain itself indefinitely.
I honestly don't think it will. In fact, I think it already failed some time ago, and we are feeling the effects of it right now.
The article brings up the number of people who are, or at least feel that they are, stagnating at their current jobs. It also draws the connection between the feeling stagnation and a reduction in productivity and competitiveness. But stagnation isn't typically a temporally local phenomenon; a person does not usually become redundant or stagnant overnight. However, their realization that they are redundant or stagnating can occur overnight, often after ignoring the warning signs for as long as they consciously can.
But productivity isn't just affected by the feeling of stagnation and vulnerability; it is affected by the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes. The worker can become lazy with the expectation that the employer will keep them on anyway, provided they aren't completely incompetent. This is a considerable threat if the worker doesn't give a damn about their work past the paycheck; what incentive do they have to be anything but as lazy as possible. They were clinging on to their jobs before, but the recession made them acutely aware that they were doing so and how tenuous their grip has now become.
This apathy also negatively affects productivity and competitiveness. But no one notices, because it is business as usual; at least it was. But now employers have started to notice, but they are solving the wrong problem; they assume the problem is one of insufficient data or insufficient supervision. They never assume that one or more of their underlying assumptions about their workforce, and what makes them most effective, might not be true and might never have been true.
I hope that people wake up to the larger lesson this turmoil is wanting to teach all of us. Unproductive people working in what are effectively sinecures are not a sustainable way to run an economy based on the production and distribution of wealth. Eventually, someone will ask where all this wealth is, and won't abide a waffling, noncommittal answer.