As for the Nordics. With the fall of the USSR you had a massive worker pool starting to compete with the Western workers for jobs. Especially China opening up allowed companies to not negotiate with unions and just offshore jobs. At the same time you had massive growth in the global work force, just from population growth. That gave capitalist the option to offshore jobs and that weakened the labor movement. That really hurt the left in the West a lot, as they obviously had the most expensive workers in the world.

The good news is that this is changing. China and the US are in a trade war. Russia is in a real war. Most of the world already has opened up to capitalism, so the number of locations to offshore to are limited. Population growth is slowing down, with the working age population growing much much slower.

We can already see some changes. Unions are getting stronger in the US. Same story in Europe, with some truely large strikes recently. That probably means better workers rights and so forth in the future. If not with the unions then some other way.