It’s just the market sending a message that, at an unreasonable wage, you’re going to be replaced by something less expensive. If labor had scaled its demands back to something for reasonable, how many jobs now done by robots in the auto industry would have been filled with skilled humans living in America? If the steel workers had reasonable wage demands, perhaps that industry could have modernized and competed effectively with the cheaper steel coming from Japan. After all, we bombed their steel industry into oblivion in WWII and they replaced it with new technology while we limped along with 1890’s plants topped with crippling wage demands.
Still, people don’t get it and choose to ignore the lessons of history, despite the fact that history is strewn with the same wreckage time-after-time. Stupid...
Steelworker wages were a form of profit sharing. When the profits went away the market adjusted. Dramatically.