Why Gen X and Gen Y do not trust large organizations

I found writer Charles Stross' comment on what the Edward Snowden affair means for organizations and their younger employees very affecting:

...The big government/civil service agencies are old. They're products of the 20th century, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they're still living in the days of the "job for life" culture; potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that's how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white collar paper pushers back in the 1950s... 

...The key facts are: Generation X's parents expected a job for life, but with few exceptions Gen Xers never had that — they're used to nomadic employment, hire-and-fire, right-to-work laws, the whole nine yards of organized-labour deracination. Gen Y's parents are Gen X. Gen Y has never thought of jobs as permanent things. Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement ("we'll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization") is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it's about as real as the divine right of kings.  

Employers are alien hive-mind colony intelligences who will fuck you over for the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet. They'll give you a laptop and tell you to hot-desk or work at home so that they can save money on office floorspace and furniture. They'll dangle the offer of a permanent job over your head but keep you on a zero-hours contract for as long as is convenient. This is the world they grew up in: this is the world that defines their expectations.

First, I think the statement about "employers" is perhaps a bit overly broad, and really applies to large organizations -- however, those are the organizations that have the resources and salaries that are most desirable, so maybe it's more on point than I'd like to admit.

Second, I see a lot of this in my personal experience. As you know, my father (whom I love dearly) has worked for the same medium-sized corporation since the late 1970s; I clearly remember the rounds of layoffs and mergers and national-media-level scandals that I saw as a teenager. Because of my dad's long rants at the dinner table, I've always held corporate America at arm's length. (What's funny, of course, is that my beloved dad can't understand why I'm hesitant to work for large companies. Sigh.)

Stross' concluding comments are really about the lack of loyalty that we tend to see in modern organizations (italics are by Stross)

We human beings are primates. We have a deeply ingrained set of cultural and interpersonal behavioural rules which we violate only at social cost. One of these rules, essential for a tribal organism, is bilaterality: loyalty is a two-way street. (Another is hierarchicality: yield to the boss.) Such rules are not iron-bound or immutable — we're not robots — but our new hive superorganism employers don't obey them instinctively, and apes and monkeys and hominids tend to revert to tit for tat quite easily when unsure of their relative status. Perceived slights result in retaliation, and blundering, human-blind organizations can slight or bruise an employee's ego without even noticing. And slighted or bruised employees who lack instinctive loyalty because the culture they come from has spent generations systematically destroying social hierarchies and undermining their sense of belonging are much more likely to start thinking the unthinkable.

Certainly, "the unthinkable" is different for an intelligence organization than an employer of scientists and engineers. That said, the lack of trust between employer and employee probably manifests itself in less productivity improvements and/or innovation than the employer would expect...