Capitalist wage labor is inefficient because workers aren't invested in the actual work being done

Let's say I hear a spill in the back room. I could go back and clean it now, but it's near the end of my shift and I could just pretend not to have heard it and let it be someone else's problem. It's better for everyone if spills are cleaned right away, but I get paid the same regardless, so what do I care? The time our staff saves is funneled upward toward the people who own the inventory, so screw the afternoon shift, they get to deal with my shit, and then tomorrow morning I get to come into the mess made by the night crew. This sort of thing happens all the time in basic labor jobs because the extent to which we care about the big picture is so limited, due to our position the hierarchy.

I currently work part time at a deli, meaning my job is to process food for other people to eat. But in my mind that's not really what I'm doing. The goal I'm working toward isn't maximizing the amount of food I produce or the amount of people I feed. It's maximizing the number of dollars I get paid and minimizing the effort I put in to attain those dollars. This often comes at the expense of our customers, who in theory you would think are the whole point of our operation, right? But the way the whole system is set up, to ensure that I'm not directly invested in the end result—that I'm just this free-floating dependent who has to rely on these other people making profits for me to get paid—creates this conflict of interest between work and worker that holds society back, because there's this invisible loss of effort to disconnected apathy that gets woven all throughout the system.

This is acceptable to any given capitalist, of course, because they have their own disconnect to deal with: it doesn't matter to them what's best for society in general because they aren't invested in society in general. All that matters to them is their business, and what happens to get the most money for one particular business is that all its employees be kept in a state of dependence, because if your employees have their own investments to build then that's time they're not spending building your investments for you. That's the capitalists' game: invest in something, then do whatever you can to convince other people to work to increase the value of that thing even though it's your investment not theirs. That's the capitalist system.