That is because the whole US system is broken. Put yourself in the shoes of those workers. You have no skills apart from the one you got from doing the same job

That is because the whole US system is broken. Put yourself in the shoes of those workers. You have no skills apart from the one you got from doing the same job for 20 years. No prospect for decent future employment. Shitty unemployment benefits. No job retraining offers. Why do we not have these problems in e.g. Nordic countries? Because we are superior blonde Aryans? Because we have no black people? Because we are so "homogenous"? Yes... plenty of possible racist explanations. But the much simpler reasons is that there is a system that takes care of people. E.g. a country like Denmark spends 10x as much as the US to retrain a laid off worker. Higher education is free. Vocational training and crafts are baked into the high school system. Unemployment benefits are generous and you get a lot of help to get a new job or retrain for another one. Perhaps more importantly you don't have really narrow skilled jobs to begin with. E.g. in the US factories tend to hire people with almost no skills to do a very narrow job. In Nordic countries you go through extensive vocational training programs giving you a broad set of skills. When you work in factory you will be doing a much wider variety of tasks, thus blue collar workers retain a broader set of skills. This means when they are fired, they have a lot more options even without retraining to find other jobs. The Anglo-Saxon approach utterly lacks long term thinking. It is all about slotting a guy into a task as quickly and cheaply as possible. Only problem is that if that is the only thing that guy can do and the only thing he has learned, he will hold onto that job for dear life. Sorry, if this comes across as negative. I don't really want to diss America and brag about us being better. I just feel it is deeply unfair how low skilled simple workers always have to get all the blame in America. It is always their fault. There is never a will to look at the bigger picture. To see the structures that trap people. My purpose isn't to brag about Nordics but to try to stand up for the American blue collar worker. I think they deserve some more sympathy and understanding.