In general, the relationship between employer and employee has never been balanced. One thing that induced balance in the middle of the 20th century was the power of unions in the middle of high-demand industries; after World War II, manufacturing and transportation were massively valuable to rebuild tracts of the world bombed to bedrock, and this put bargaining power in the hands of labor because labor in e.g. heavy manufacturing and rail had already organized; bosses were incentivized to work within those power structures because there was so much money to be made hitting quotas that it was in nobody's interest to slow process. Your company was your extended family because the union had made it so (it's not like bosses would be offering those pensions out of the goodness of their hearts).

That balance began to unravel as the world rebuilt, manufacturing moved out of its traditional bases, and labor shifted from industry to service without a corresponding shift of service to unionized workplaces.

The Boomers' attitude towards work is shaped by experiencing the benefits of the closest the US came to strong labor representation and national-level socialism, if not outright communism.