probably because their efforts won't be rewarded. get the minimum to scrape by and you do the minimum effort. busting your balls used to be rewarded. people would work at the same company their entire lives not expecting to ever get laid off. you could buy a house. and it all started with a firm handshake.

now its some cold corporation, whose first contact with you is a humiliating hr interview asking stupid fucking questions after many such corpos already ghosted you often with fake job listing. you don't get to choose where you apply to work because over half the jobs are ghost jobs so it becomes a numbers game of applying to as many jobs as possible. and you know these corpos could lay you off or replace you with a foreign worker for less pay anytime. its a heartless megacorp with no loyalty to you, and you're going to reciprocate that lack of loyalty.

its like relationships. in the past you met a woman, you got married, you stayed together for decades and that was the average relationship. now we have hookup culture where the few who fuck bounce across dozens of partners over the years while the rest of us are forever alone. and even those people getting laid are not going to have the same dedication and loyalty to their hookup partners because even if they pretend the're madly in love statistically deep down they know its probably just another hookup. jobs now are the same way. and just as hookups today wont net you a family, jobs today wont net you a house.