I don't think public-sector unions are to blame. PS unions are kept in check because of the free market system. If they get too greedy and the company can't make profits, the company fails and so does the PS union.
The real problem with America is the ever growing Federal Government and burdensome Federal/State Regulations. You can also throw in allowing our borders and immigration systems to be open, flooding the economy with low skill, low education, benefit dependent illegal aliens.
The Federal Government took in the highest tax revenue in history last year. However, they still couldn't balance their budget. And because of baseline budgeting gimmicks, very few if any at all Federal Agencies see "real" cuts to their budgets -- they only see changes to the rates of increase in budgets.
To make matters worse, as the government expands and grows, more money is wasted, stolen from necessary programs to fund stupid and wasteful programs. This means there's less money in the budget to do the things taxes were paid for in the first place: repair infrastructure, schools, military, healthcare, etc.etc. The bigger it gets, the more waste, the less money there is available.
Our Federal Government is sucking our country dry. I'm not saying I want dirty air and water, reckless corporate free-for-all. We need rational policies and regulations and a rational tax code.
As someone alluded to earlier, we have roughly 90 million people of working age not in the labor force. That is not sustainable. We can't afford that. Yet we keep allowing illegals into our country. Illegals undermine the workforce, cause wage depression, and allow businesses who use them to undercut those who play by the rules.
Moving on from the out of control Federal Government, we then turn to the National Debt. Even though the USA took in record tax revenues last year, we still added $484 billion dollars to the national debt which currently stands at $18.2 trillion dollars.
The largest budget items are Medicare/Medicaid $926B, Social Security $806B, Defense $594B, Income Security $310B, and Federal Pensions $251B.
The cost of our debt is roughly $240 Billion a year. If you be the CBO Accounting Office, they project our debt payment to increase to nearly $800 Billion a year. Of course those CBO folks seem to always underestimate a projected cost.
If they can't balance the budget now with record tax revenues, how in the hell are they going to balance the budget when the debt interest payments increase due to higher interest rate increases?
All of this crap takes a huge burden on our companies, large and small. This is why wages have gone down.