How does “I’m doing the bare minimum to make it not worth it to fire me” compare to “I’m being paid a larger proportion for the value I create” for you? To clarify, the former happens by decreasing output and the latter by getting paid more for existing output and obviously can be harder to achieve in practice. In both cases the company could be getting (or feeling they’re getting) lower value for money from the worker.
I think the meaning behind this sentence is not as black and white as you might interpret it. And it's also probably hard to impossible to actually quantify exactly.
How do you really equate your 'output' (value) with the money you are being paid? There's no direct 1:1 relation or easy formula. Even if you try to come up with an elaborate scheme of metrics, there really isn't a perfect way for it.
That said let's assume you could measure that somehow. Even then the underlying meaning of "bare minimum not to get fired" is not that you provide the exact 1:1 match of value you provide to the money you are getting paid (including benefits etc). There exists some X < 1, where you aren't getting fired but the value you provide is definitely smaller than the money you get paid. Is it 0.8:1? 0.5:1? 0.1:1?
Whatever that actual number is though, at most companies I've been at that number that lets you stay on is so low that nobody can argue that you're "just" doing your duty to extract as much value from the company for as little work as you can get away with (after all, in most cases the company is definitely trying to do that in reverse). It's so low that anybody that isn't doing the same thing gets severely demotivated. If I do my 1:1 or even a 0.8:1 or whatever and I like my job, then watching a 0.1:1 not being fired and even actively protected in some cases is awful.
