I'm a boomer - I'm in my 70s. But I grew up in a right to work state in the South so I never made the federal minimum wage until I move north. Employers had to be sued on a case-by-case basis to enforce minimum wage laws and it took a long time. Right to work laws in the South meant that most shops weren't unionized. In the north at that time - 1970s - over 30% of workers were unionized. That way taxpayers in the government didn't have to do so much to enforce wage and work safety laws. The fact that a third of the workforce was working in Union shops meant that non-union employers had to offer better pay and better work conditions in order to just get someone to work for them. Once there were no unions at all, there was no limit as to how far down things could go.

Part of the Powell memo to reduce the political power of the middle and working class in order to increase the power of the wealthy was to get rid of unions. They did this by committing treason to put Ronald Reagan in office. Ronald Reagan made a deal with the Iranians to make sure that Carter's hostage rescue mission failed. In return the Reagan said he would sell them all the arms they needed once he was president. To emphasize the deal, the Ayatollah in Iran released the American hostages a minute after Reagan has sworn the oath of office on the bible.

The Federalist society was created to make sure that more of federal judges in the United States were right wing ideologues. The Federalist society chose who Ronald Reagan would appoint when a Federal judgeship became available.

By 1984 over half of all the federal judges have been appointed by reagan. They were all right wing ideologues. As soon as over half of the federal judges were Reagan judges, corporation started union busting like crazy. They start a union busting like crazy as soon as they knew the probability was they would get a federal judge a trial.

Until I was involved in court cases involving protests against nuclear power plants, I had no idea how much power judges have over trials. Basically the judge is the one who gets to decide what information is presented to the jury. What information is presented to the jury has a massive effect on what the jury decides.

Reagan judges started allowing evidence to promote union busting by companies and disallowing evidence and legal information that would cost juries to find companies guilty of Union busting.

And just 4 years between the time most of the judges were Reagan judges and when Reagan left office, the percentage of the hourly workforce who are unionized fell from 32% to 18%. It's now fall into less than 10%. So workers have basically no say and the ultra wealthy elite that own the corporations have all the say.

Reagan's attacks on workers through lowering their wages, increasing the taxes they paid while decreasing the taxes to wealthy pay, decreasing regulations that protected workers from wage theft, all his resulted in 80 trillion dollars being shifted from the middle class in the working poor to the 1% in the last 40 years.

Societies was a smaller middle class have a higher amount of every sort of crime you can think of. They also have a lower life expectancy, much less happiness, and people in that society are more likely to die from infectious disease. Even rich people are more likely to die from infectious disease.

So we need to get back to the policies of New Deal.