As horrific as communism was, the average worker in the west probably indirectly benefited from capitalist being scared of something similar happening closer to home, and gave concessions.
After the fall of communism that trend reversed and workers are steadily loosing ground.
As someone who was born in one of those communist countries I am glad that its dead, and I don't want it to ever come back, but It did serve as an example of what can happen if you try to squeeze too much out of people.
If this was truly the case, humans would have evolved very differently (and it's needs would be substantially smaller.
Also, what about all those people working for little gain?
Also, as another data-point: slaveholders of all eras could not stop complaining about how lazy their slaves were. They expected the slaves to give their all, even though practically nothing was in it for them.
It sounds like management intentionally created these practices. This is from a recent NY Times article about Amazon warehouse workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if this attitude was applied to all workers in the company to some degree:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/amazon-wareho...:
> 5. Many of Amazon’s most contentious policies go back to Jeff Bezos’ original vision. Some of the practices that most frustrate employees — the short-term-employment model, with little opportunity for advancement, and the use of technology to hire, monitor and manage workers — come from Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive.
> He believed that an entrenched work force created a “march to mediocrity,” said David Niekerk, a former long-serving vice president who built the company’s original human resources operations in the warehouses.
> Company data showed that most employees became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need,” Mr. Niekerk said. That conviction was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees.
In many cases software engineers overestimate their own value to the company, often to the point were they'll ape the attitudes of owners and management (e.g. rejecting the the idea of a union out of hand). But the fact of the matter is they're cogs just like warehouse workers, and in many situations competent management will exploit the hell out of them to extract maximum value for the shareholders.