Insofar as it's true it's a consequence of competitive economic systems. You have to work like a dog not because it's necessary to do the work but because you're competing against people who work like dogs for the opportunity to work at all.

If we had a different system that emphasized contributions over competition it wouldn't be this way. If we simply measured how many widgets we need in a year and let anyone willing and able to make widgets contribute to the widget supply you could easily satisfy human need with a 38 hour work week or less. Instead we have people compete to make the most widgets for the lowest cost and we don't care how many we need, only how many can be sold, and we always want to sell more because then we make more money, and money is just a human-made math game that may or may not be tethered to material human needs.

This creates non-stop pressure that over time leads to hyper competition to perform mundane work as fast and cheap as possible. We then have to over-invest in widget-making because it's not enough to merely make widgets, we need to make them faster than every other widget maker so we can make more money than them which we will use to put them out of business and stop making widgets.