Since the 1970s, growth in “real wages” (that is, the value of the dollars paid to employees after being adjusted for inflation) has slowed compared to overall economic productivity.
Previous economic research has pointed to two explanations for this stagnation, especially among lower-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector: globalization has flooded the market with cheap goods from China and sapped domestic-manufacturing wages in the process; and technology has steadily ushered in more job-killing automation.
“None of these explanations goes back long enough in time,” he says. Wage growth has been slowing since the early 1970s, but “the competition with China starts somewhere in the 1990s, and the process of automation is a product of the last ten or fifteen years.”
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/wage-stagnation-in-americaNow add in the the rest of the industrialized world, which have seen a rise in the "real wages" compared to US workers, even with high unionization and tax paid healthcare (which increases wages for workers!!)
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