You are right in what you describe, it absolutely is an unfair world in many ways. What you describe is the dark/unbridled side of capitalism, or perhaps its essence... It's the system we are all in and that enforces certain situations and behaviours.
(btw, in all honesty, I wish humanity manages to come up with a better alternative).
I do like to believe that eventhough the system may be rotten the people are not, not all, and that thus not all companies are either.

The problems you describe in your article however do not necessarily emanate from capitalism and an intention of the "employer class" to exploit the working class. In my opinion they emanate from human organisations.

If you forget capitalism for a moment, we can say that a company is a group of people that are united by a common purpose and agree to work towards shared goals.

I invite you into a thought experiment: Imagine a post-capitalist world. Let's assume that in this world we still need trains. So you still need people to make and repair trains. You also need people to run the trains and the train-stations.

So in this post-capitalistic world there will still be some form of labour. It would be fair that we all get to share the load of "making and maintaining the things we need to live comfortably". Equal division of labour. So each one of us will still have a sort of a job (just not linked to a salary). Now imagine this "company" that makes and repairs the trains needs a new engineer. The people already "working" there care about the quality of their work and want to find someone who is competent and a good cultural fit. No evil intentions here, no wish to exploit... Do you think that the 'recrutement' proces will go any different? And how about a "layoff" scenario? What if thanks to technological advancement this "company" now needs less engineers. Equal division of labor also means they cannot just reduce working time in their company and keep everyone as that would be unfair to all the other "companies". They will have to "free up" people so their can contribute to other domains in society. How would that "layoff" process go? Volunteering? Group feedback? I am sincerely curious to know your answer. 😊

Back to the US and THEM. I have a hard time pinpointing the THEY... Who are these people ? The CEOs? The hiring managers? (let's not forget they are employees themselves) The stakeholders? Who are these stakeholders? If you have data or articles that qualify the THEY please share, I am interested.

I sometimes wonder whether we are not all indirectly those "stakeholders". An exemple: you put your money in the bank, and you like your 3% return. To give you that, the bank invests your money in a company and expects a return. This forces the company to earn even more, so they double down on efforts to cut costs and sell more. And there we are, in our viscious circle of capitalism and consumerism. The one does not go without the other...