So now you have a three individual contributors, a line manager, a human resource people lead or whatever it's called this year and many many meetings.
You simply can't "do more with less" in the long term by overloading people. There are only 8 hours in the workday. So the ridiculous growth mandates of Jack Welch et al simply create a certain amount of disappointment that needs to be absorbed somewhere in the org chart.
Autistics can frequently do the work, but they have difficulty handling this particular trauma of not making the numbers being demanded. Of disappointing their bosses. Demanding unrealistic numbers is an attempt to stress the people at the bottom into staying busy all the time, and if they are already busy all the time, they will show no improvement.
Stay on for a few years and you internalize that a certain amount of disappointment is mandated, and should not be taken personally. The "expectations" might be distant goals, but they were never expected. Chasing the sunrise a bit, day by day - you'll never get there. If you're putting in your eight hours, staying busy, you're doing all you can, and you should treat a manager asking for more like you would a new CEO who's completely illiterate - dangerous but not living in the same world, informationally, as you.
If you have a manager that isn't completely incompetent, they would rather keep on an employee like OP and not meet goals, than deal with a new hire who will be even worse relative to goals. It is only when management is spineless, incompetent, or corrupt that they give in to this sort of pressure and let go of performers.
My sense is that this is due to automation, not “neoliberal capitalism” as the author says. It’s much easier to automate a job if it’s a single task that’s done in a deterministic way.
Put briefly, Adolf Hennecke was the poster boy for a productivity campaign like what management tried to effectuate in the story, and that the author thinks has anything to do with neoliberalism. The thing is that Adolf Hennecke didn't live in a neoliberalist country or work for a neoliberalist company, he lived in East Germany and worked for a VEB, which you may translate as "public corporation". He worked for a state-owned company with a duty to general society rather than any shareholders.