It is. Why do you think I'm changing careers? The phenomenon of having graduates go into industry or switch fields entirely (consulting or Wall Street, for instance) has been around for some time. I think more so in the past 10-20 years than before that but it's been around. But a relatively new phenomenon that current and future PhDs will have to deal with is this (at least in chemistry, which is the field I know best). Pharma companies have figured out that they can pay PIs in academia to "consult" on their R&D teams. What this translates to is that the work that a PhD chemist would be doing with the company is now shifted to PIs, who are paid less than staff chemists (but still substantial sums of money) to "consult," or have the people working for that PI do the job for the company. Why pay a PhD a hefty salary with full benefits when you can pay someone else much less to do it? So the staff chemist jobs are drying up and industry positions are now even becoming harder to find. There definitely are substantial cuts to the number of PI positions open in industry.
At the same time, large universities are trying to rein in costs and hiring more lecture staff than tenure-track faculty. So those positions are also drying up. So here you have the same level of or even higher levels of PhDs graduating and competing in a smaller labor market. Basic economics can tell us how that's going to go.
"Publish or perish" has always been the de facto regime in academia. PIs are expected to contribute to their own salary through grants and the only way to get grants is to have a lot of peer-reviewed publications so people believe that you're legit and are more comfortable giving their money to you. So to even become a PI, you have to publish a lot. And that effect has trickled down to post-doc positions as well, since there are many PhDs graduating and few post-doctoral fellowships open. So you distinguish applicants by publication number and quality. If you don't publish at either the post-doc or PI level, you either never get a tenure-track faculty position or the research funding/grants dry up and you can't do research. There's no way to get out of this cycle unless research funding can be dissociated from publications and another metric used to evaluate who gets the money. Sometimes, the number of publications doesn't matter as much as the quality of the proposal. A starting PI might have a very good strategy for attacking the big problems in science but that requires time and money. Time is in short supply because if he doesn't get publishing, he's not going to get any money. But to get money, he has to attack smaller questions that take less time to answer. So this whole cycle perpetuates.
