Why? A farmer works hard to preserve his cows' health (every cow that gets sick is lost money), yet they are fungible units on their way to the meet grinder.
Sick cows don't always mean lost money, and farmers don't work hard to preserve the aspects of the cow's health that doesn't cost them money. For example, it's actually cheaper to keep cows in conditions that would cause any animal to suffer from depression, than to care for their mental health.
It may seem weird to talk about the mental health of beef cattle, but we're not talking about beef cattle, we're talking about workers, whose mental health absolutely does matter.
It is reality at many organizations largely down to competing and mutually exclusive metrics and objectives that are being reviewed separately
For example one Team may review and be responsible for Production Metrics and standards, and a completely separate team is responsible for reviewing Safety standards, and often the 2 groups create directives that impact the other with out giving a shit how the people that have to implement and follow them actually go about doing that
This happens often in large enterprises. A way to optimize your internal meritocracy is to have competing interests. “Reduce our cost to serve” and “improve our customer service” are very often competing parallel tasks. For IT, “improve our effectiveness” and “improve our efficiency”. On one hand your internal apps and policies need to satisfy your “internal customers”. On the other hand, your total costs per FTE need to be the lowest in your industry peer group.
Not necessarily. You can work hard on something and still not cover all the bases, leaving the door open for abuse somewhere else. A corporation is not a single unit. Some are working hard on one avenue, some on another. It just happens that one avenue is squeezing more profit and if this comes at the price of treating employees as fungible units and firing "inconvenient" ones so be it.
This is some pretty agile dancing. :)