> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades

Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.

For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.

The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.

Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".