> Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.

It's a start though. If the plant stays closed, those "comparably high wages" certainly aren't coming back. If the plant opens, there's a chance.

There's a lot of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" protecting a shitty status quo: "don't do that because it doesn't fix X," implicitly requires that one solution fix everything perfectly all at once.

Yes, the hard part is convincing owners to part with their wealth in order to fund better pay. This is partly because they themselves are wrapped up in a massive obligatory apparatus; call it "the financialization of the economy." I'm by no measure a Trump supporter, but I do hope that what we're seeing is a proper crash that wipes out some of these folks. Once defaults are rampant, you'll have destroyed a lot of wealth, but also a lot of the obligations that necessitated all of this shifting of wealth upward in the first place. You'd also have a lot of very sophisticated people in the clock-in line, suddenly very interested in pay equity. That's one of the happier scenarios, at least.