As the countless number of stores closed entirely or with massively reduced opening hours shows, societies that over-pay for bullshit jobs (=investment bankers, C-level executives, ...) and under-pay workers who do actual work in gruesome conditions don't do well either once workers realize the power is with them.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.

Wrong, value is created subjectively, by other people desiring the products of that labor. If nobody wants what the laborers created, then their labor had no value.

Roll a rock up and down a hill all day. You'll work hard as hell but you'll create no value. Anybody who denies the subjective theory of value is out to lunch.

Sit and stare at a rock and you have created no new value.

Labor can also destroy value, for example when a building is destroyed in a riot, or when a rock is pushed up a hill to a location that makes it less valuable.

but most raw material requires applied labor to become valuable: at the very least transportation to them

Everybody makes misteaks.