The people who outsourced things weren't simply trying to reduce gains made by unions, they were looking at price differences that could not exist in the US due to cost and standard of living. They certainly weren't looking at both sides of this in terms of long term effect either!
I don't want employees to get those earnings. I don't want investors or shareholders to get them either. I want consumers to get lower prices.
they were looking at price differences that could not exist in the US due to cost and standard of living
Again, what does that mean, "standard of living"? That we indulge industrial labor monopolies and pay more for manufactured goods than we need or want to like the 60's? How do you feel about paying $5000 for that computer? Or that we reward landlords and enrich landowners for participating in the creation of dysfunctional regulations?
I agree - Western industrialists have been able to play both sides of the equation - outsourcing production to places where industrial cost-control is effective and selling in to markets where there's a large upper-middle class of well-compensated credentialed professionals like us and entitled land-owners.
But I don't think that the solution is to give more power to industrial labor unions. My own pet solution is German worker councils - if only because they empower workers and make managers and industrialists accountable to employee needs, but at the same time can't coordinate labor demands across an industry. Managers can't ignore employee welfare but also employees can't gang up on consumers. But no one else wants this - industrialists hate the idea of inviting unions in to C-level planning and unions at their core want labor monopolies.
It means something very plain: nobody in the US would have accepted those wages to prevent profit-based outsourcing. So it wasn't a question of union parasites forcing people overseas, it just was something that would not have worked, structurally.
Consumers getting lower prices forever and ever is a single-dimension focus, like you otherwise seem to be decrying, since you're not answering any of the other questions there about how to prevent profiteering or powerful wealthy people from playing both sides. You're looking at just one side but proclaiming it as a secret insight that is the only way to move forward. I don't think worker councils would've done anything to let US production and labor prices compete with offshore labor prices in the past 50 years... if you can make t-shirts cheaper by stripping those labor costs to the bone, but the cost of everything else those workers need is untouched, how will it fix it?