It's true that employees will always be a line item (in the eyes of the board/shareholders anyway), but I don't think this story really demonstrates that. Mostly it demonstrates a breakdown of trust between the author and his boss.
Ultimately relationships with humans are what matter and the only place we can ever really put any level of trust. Corporations themselves don't have agency or even consciousness—they are just the chaotic sum of actions by a wide range of people with different varieties and levels of power, most of whom will never know, let alone care, about you as an individual. Dystopian as that sounds, it's not really different from the natural world. The key is not to anthropomorphize an organization—companies and jobs come and go, but the reputation and relationships you build with people are what will sustain you.
The point of this article is that the relationship between the author and his boss was irrelevant. A business doesn’t trust or distrust a line item. The business simply discards the line item in the safest way possible when it is no longer needed. You should never assume that your boss’s feelings about you will come into play during termination at all.
That's the point, but it's a weird way to illustrate it - by focusing on being fired from a very small business by a single person who did so in a very hurtful manner.
> Corporations themselves don't have agency or even consciousness
"Agency" in the sense you're using it is "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power" (Merriam Webster). It seems pretty clear that corporations have that.
As for consciousness, prove it. But first read "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious": https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...