Jill Lepore’s article, What’s Wrong with the Way We Work, is a really important read. I think it gets at a lot of things that people who are unhappy are dealing with. Here is one of the important points:
Outside of agriculture, more than one in three working Americans belonged to a union in the fifties. In 1983, one in five belonged to a union; by 2019, only one in ten did. Union membership declined; income inequality rose. To explain this, Suzman points to the “Great Decoupling” of the nineteen-eighties: wages and economic growth used to track each other. From about 1980, in the United States, the G.D.P. kept growing, even as real wages stagnated. [Emphasis added]