Everything we say here is a gross generalization. As one, cheap jobs is a stronger explanation than, say, automation, and I’ll defend it in a moment.
First, I need to rant that history is as enormous as and maybe more complicated than the universe. Multiple approaches to “how we got to here” necessarily exist. As in the example above, people tend to look at their fields of interest and expertise to concoct brief stories that have beginnings, middles, and ends, sometimes happy endings, sometimes sad ones. I know of anthologies in which writers were given the same base idea and told to write a story around it. No two of the stories are ever different. History should - must, most would say - adhere to nonfiction but the way history is told is always a story, meant to be persuasive. What is neoliberalism? It is a story, told by different people in different ways.
What is that but globalism? Globalism didn’t begin last Tuesday. Most historians argue today that world trade arose as we see it from the realizations of European sea-bordering nations that they could do just that, by invading and colonizing some territories and setting up trade routes with others for non-viable European products like silk and spices, sugar and cotton. Soon plantations exploiting cheap labor sprouted in the Americas and Asia; later this was extended to Africa along with mining.
Modern-day globalism is not different at its base. We still talk about slave labor, exploited workforces, corporations owning workers’ lives. The hand of the “Free Market” is not in the least invisible. It is made possible by governments allowing corporate entities to act as imperially as nation-states once did, with as few ramifications.
That there have ever been ramifications is what has historically stratified liberals from conservatives (the names also a gross generalization encompassing a series of historic movements). Conservatives strip profit-draining regulations; liberals encourage public-benefit regulations. The dividing line is sometimes hard to see but the tendency is clear.
Both conservatives and liberals have failed the public. (That segments morphed into the arguably far worse neoconservatives and neoliberals meant that little to no progress could ever be made.) No question this is a failure of leadership.
Leadership can be opposed by a united public. (Vastly different such movements have been called progressives in the the U.S. but it’s the only handy name.) Progressives have had some success at ramifications. They tend to come in spurts every 20-30 years since the beginning of the 20th century. When they have had public backing they’ve won. When the public is indifferent or actively hostile (“forced” busing the 60s) they not only have failed but likely set back their causes for long periods. (Schools in many places are more segregated today than in the 60s because people moved to places with similar others, thereby also making neighborhoods more politically skewed than at any other time.)
This is the story as my reading and outlook tells it. Vast money on one side and vast numbers on the other. Progress is made only on the rare instances when the latter stands up to the former. This is difficult because some of the vast amounts of money have “trickled down” making hundreds of millions around the world palpably better than off than in the past. (The same forces drew farmers to horrifying factory jobs in horrifying slums because that life was still somehow better than their previous life. This scenario continues to play out today in Africa and Asia.)
Good leaders may cause, and certain widen progressive instances, but expecting good leaders to herd the interests of cats on a regular basis is futile. When your curtains are torn, blame the cats - not leadership.
tl;dr Everybody is at fault except the few who aren’t.