The US owner class and the conservative/centrist governments have always hated unions. The Pinkertons aren’t storybook stuff, they’re real thugs who did real violence(and who still exist today). Strike-breaking, incredibly weak laws around protecting people who try to unionize, and aggressive “individualism”(it only serves to isolate people because we’re weaker apart) are all great ways to slowly discourage people from standing up for themselves.

In some ways, people did decide that it wasn’t worth it, but that wasn’t really tied to the union being bad, more out of the fear of being punished. Jobs were shipped overseas, and poor people who can’t afford US-made goods only hastened the downfall of the US manufacturing as they chose cheap products from department stores and allowed all their local equipment and knowledge to rot away.

The graph is pretty on point. Our productivity, all over the world, has been sky-rocketing and pay has barely moved. Even today, unions are still important for keeping various industries held to SOME kind of standard, but they’re rare enough that it’s still not lifting the entire economy.