The American industrial worker enjoyed the high times from the end of WW II until the 1980s because it took that long for Europe and Japan to dig out from the rubble, rebuild their infrastructure and industries which of course we helped them do, and start competing with us again. I live in the Rust Belt, and before the wolf came to the door in the 1970s some mill workers were making forty bucks an hour. Of course that went to zero dollars an hour when Japanese and Eastern European steel hit the market. Their workers weren't making 40 bucks a day.