Globalization is a contributor and so is technology.
But, at the end of the day, it's down to how companies choose to distrubute the gains created from lower costs and higher productivity. One easy way to see the inequity here is to eliminate workers from the equation and look at the meteoric rise in CEO comp alone. That metric is 1,460% from 1978 to 2021. [0]
Bringing workers back into it (for context), their increase over the same period was just 18.1%. [0]
Another offset to the globalization argument is that unemployment has hit lower levels than during periods of much more equitable compensation priorities, yet wages still remained stagnant. You might say, "well, yeah, but the jobs that were replaced were higher paying", which would be true for some sectors like manufacturing. But, again, these are company decisions, and many other sectors that remained healthy have still seen nothing near the rise in executive comp. Keep in mind that increases in worker skill have also contributed greatly to productivity.
And, this doesn't even get into stock buybacks and other "financial engineering" that redistribute what might've otherwise been used to more fairly compensate workers to investors and other stakeholders instead.
Organized labor was a proven way to ensure gains were distributed more equitably to workers. It's no coincidence that decades of breaking unions coincided with the detachment of their wages from productivity.
