The problem isn’t CEO culture, or any recent shifts towards productivity and efficiency. The problem is, and always has been, capitalism. Which, mind you, is a kick-ass system for creating wealth, but not so much for distributing it. John Stuart Mill laid out the differences between the creation of wealth, which he saw as being dictated by hard facts, technology, and hard limits (no matter how much you will it, that machine won’t work any faster or that corn ripen any sooner), while the distribution of wealth was entirely within the control of a society. Smith’s capitalist model was predicated on constant growth, growth that would continuously expand the need for economic activity (including labor) and would continue to make everyone rich. Ricardo pointed out the dangers of automation and mechanization, though; even in a growth economy, if someone can substitute more efficient machines for people, they would. Ricardo weaseled his way out of actually working through the problem by, you guessed it, postulating high growth that would create new jobs for those displaced by the machines.
But the problem is still the same–capitalism exists to make money for individuals. Not to provide jobs. Not to, directly, contribute to society. :Society benefits because, as long as the rocket is going up, there’s plenty of wealth for everyone (including the nation). But that benefit is, and always has been, a by-product of the system, not the goal of the system. Marx’s approach, to make the goal of the system social benefit, faltered because the only way to pay for it was to, first, have a wildly successful capitalist economy–which, um, no one wanted to dismantle to institute the workers’ paradise, for some reason.
What we have today is nothing really new conceptually, though the scope, scale, and implications are pretty astronomical. Business exists to make money for its owners. Labor is a cost. The prime directive is to lower costs. Ergo, lowering labor costs, often by getting rid of as many workers as possible, is not just good business, it’s written into the DNA of the system. We just assumed that because it benefited society to have most people with productive jobs and good standards of living, the system would value those things too. But the system never gave a rat’s ass, not on its own. We had to push, prod, and regulate it into doing so. Sure, a fair number of business people, big and small, understood the broader, long-term benefits of stable work forces, a widely distributed body of consumers with adequate to ample means rather than a few hyper-consumers, and the like, but these businesses did so at their peril. Once the stockholders see that they are actually losing on their ROI by not outsourcing, offshoring, automating, etc., then all hell breaks loose.
So if you want to change this thing, you need to bring capitalism to heel using the power of the state. Which, itself, is a dangerous and tricky thing to do, but it’s sort of an either/or situation.