One of the broad problems of contemporary left-wing politics is that so much of it is built on a chart that shows a divergence between output and wages that starts in the early 1970s and then attributes this to a conspiracy by the bosses to steal labor.

The problem is that you have stagflation at the beginning of this, followed by a massive restructuring of American industry which ended up producing a more highly automated, more highly productive manufacturing sector that was substantially smaller,

which in turn led to an occupational structure where more people were working in relatively low-paying service jobs, and where academic credentials became increasingly important for moving up the wage structure.

It is very difficult to attribute any of this to decisions by corporate executives or investors, beyond the basic fact that American industry had to transform itself to be able to effectively compete with European, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean industry, etc.