>You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior.

Or insufficient capital investment and bad management holding down productivity. You can't pay a worker more than their productivity, but if the best you can get out of them is too little, it may not be worth their while. You could then plausibly see a shortage of workers, wage suppression, and stagnant productivity statistics at the same time.

You are describing insufficient demand, not insufficient workers. The reasons for low demand are more or less irrelevant to worker pay, just that demand is low.

Yes, there are many curious effects and phenomena once we dispense with this silly expectation of business being sustainable.

I think"can but really don't want to" would explain part of it. What do people do when presented with a workable but unappealing solution? They complain a lot and then grudgingly do it.

If the workers are scared of a recession and losing their jobs you can.