When the powers that be decided labor didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was capital.

One will never get rich on wages. The only way to get rich is through asset manipulation and rent-seeking.

It's always been this way. America has just been able to coast on being the only remaining major economy after WW2, and exploited the rest of the world instead. That exploitation of the rest of the globe has been mostly optimized now, so those shareholder returns are now coming at the expense of the 90% of Americans who aren't sitting at the table.

If you're in a market where a competitor can cut their costs to produce the same quality product, end customers don't know (and if they knew, 95+% of them don't give a crap) how rich you've helped your employees get.

If someone else can make it more efficiently, there's a powerful force for you to also have to improve to match that efficiency.

"Why is the airline experience so much worse than 50 years ago?" "It's massively cheaper per seat-mile, and consumers in aggregate reveal that they prefer the cheapest price that online travel searches, so airlines deliver to that preference."

Can you think of a point in history when it wasn't.

Despite all of the problems that exist were still the best off.