You missed that part in the 1970s and 1980s when European and Asian heavy industry became competitive again after having been rebuilt following WW II with help from us, and began to clean our clocks. Japanese and Eastern European mill workers accepted a fraction of the pay and benefits that American industrial workers were getting, and the EPA showed up to cap those smokestacks. See "The Rust Belt" for what happened next. Where I live in Pittsburgh over 400,000 high paid industrial workers lost their jobs in a couple of years. Unions without workers or industry are kind of pointless. Education, medicine, and IT are the industries here now, with half the people. At least we're not Detroit.