The lack of employer loyalty and the corporate view of employees as disposable cogs to be added or downsized as needed are both mutually reinforcing and the same thing. It's two sides of the same coin. "I'm only using these people to make money" could be said by either employee or employer. If one side feels that the other side thinks this way, they're prone to consider their economic partners as disposable too. So there's something hypocritical about being on one side of the relationship and criticizing the other side for having the same attitude.
Similarly, there's something weird about holding that attitude and simultaneously thinking there's something wrong with it, and the world would be better if other people didn't think that way. The rationale is that one's economic partner (employees or employer) thinks that way and therefore one has to think that way too, or risk being exploited. It's a rehashing of the prisoner's dilemma in behavioral economics, where both sides choose the suboptimal outcome because they distrust one another. When an unloyal employee/employer wishes their employer/employee was loyal, there's also a wishfulness that one could exploit over-trusting partners. Wouldn't it be nice to job hop among employers who provide great benefits and work very hard to avoid layoffs? Wouldn't it be nice to under-compensate a bunch of company-man employees?
If we say we want the possibly mythical labor harmony that existed in the era of pensions, company towns, and lifetime employment, then we should acknowledge that we would all have to change our attitudes or that world cannot exist. Employees would have to consider their jobs the best possible alternative, and think cooperatively rather than competitively. Employers would have to start looking beyond making quarterly numbers, and start cultivating meritocratic pathways for growth instead of dead-end jobs. Shareholders would have to start accepting lumpier earnings and frequently skipped dividends, simply because management found an opportunity to reapply labor in a new way in a particular quarter, rather than doing layoffs. These ideas are simply not in our cultural zeitgeist at the moment, and I have trouble thinking them myself because I come from this era in cultural history.
What's ironic is how poorly suited our current corporate, investment, and labor culture is to our times. How many of us have worked at a company whose processes for delivering value are so complex and convoluted the saying goes "you spend your first year here learning what the company does, and your second year learning what you do!" Modern companies only earn economic returns if they can build complex and unique systems that extract value out of hypercomplex and hyper competitive environments. They really do have to come up with something new and unique, and then keep coming up with those things. And yet here they are laying off people after paying them for months/years to learn what they do - and for what benefit? So that this quarter's earnings are in line with analyst estimates despite soft sales? So the 2% dividend can be paid? Teams go through the phases of forming, storming, norming, and layoff. Corporations shed their talent and foster an us vs. them attitude that kills productivity. Meanwhile employees keep jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, job-hopping to chase tiny raises that probably include increased work hours, so no net gain for them. What a loss on all sides!