Okay, so this kind of rationale is used a lot in the US to justify treating all kinds of professions (almost always those that exist at the action layer, where you’re doing the actual nominal work of the business) like shit. The rough format is “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the {customer}?!” Of course, this is always aimed at the people at the action layer, never ever at the administrative level. So, it might be more accurate to say “YOU need to care about the customer [because nobody else will].” It’s often very closely tied to sacrifice rhetoric in the workplace, where the employer places the onus on the employee to sacrifice, often without any bound. In other words, to accept personal loss with no expectations of recompense; they’ll take as much as they can get from the employee, and no amount of sacrifice will ever be ‘enough’, as there will always be some new crisis demanding a new sacrifice.

In teaching, this is “Won’t someone please think of the kids? What will they do if there’s no school? Remember why we’re here, it’s about the kids.” In EMS and all of healthcare, just replace the kids with the patients. It’s very common to see this in any industry where they think they can get away with paying their people in passion. It’s shitty and exploitive, and it ultimately does a disservice to the customer by creating high employee turnover, low organizational experience, organizational dysfunction (often in spite of ballooning admin costs and positions in these types of sectors) and more burned out employees.