Why hasn't worker shareholding spread under capitalism? This would be the solution, wouldn't it?

The British were out of North America in 1805, FD. They'd put their eggs in India, with a local population prepared to work hard for peanuts. What the Napoleonic wars did was compel England to create a formidable naval force, and one they would use to expand the colonies even further.

Indians could never get over why England chose to ignore Indian cotton manufacturing and make it in England. This saw the end of Indian cloth manufacturing, a huge industry back then. India had cheap labour. It had cotton. Why did England go to all the trouble of sending slaves to the Americas to pick cotton to send back to Britain, and in so doing, create an industrial nightmare?

Engels described it in the Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1845. Orwell wrote the Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 - almost a hundred years later. The conditions of British workers had't changed. They were worse than Indian workers at the time. Shorter average lifespan, high infant mortality, the lot.

Fast forward a hundred and eighty years and look at the conditions of workers in Bangladesh. Perfectly capitalist, all the big global chains get their clothes made there. Like British workers during the industrial revolution, many are locked in for their shifts, which can be extended to get a contract done. No overtime, no freedom to leave and go home. Capitalism has literally created these conditions, just as it created the conditions Engels and Orwell described in their times.

Today, in China, they're going a step further - no need to turn a workforce into robots, create robots to do the work. I'm unsure where this will take us, just as I'm unsure where self-driving cars and trucks will leave those employed as drivers. My hope is they get jobs in the service industry, but as the US shows, job creation there is largely in fast-food, with an average income of $18000 a year.

None of this has created the freedom you describe. We've witnessed better pay and conditions over the years (in the developed world), but this has nothing to do with capitalism. As G has already said, this is the work of governments and unions.

The transition to service economies in the developed world is pivotal, but all we've done is outsource our working class to developing countries. Our own proletariat has had government assistance, but has been left by the free market to fend for itself.

Unions and organised labour forces are antithetical to capitalism. Within capitalism, profits must be distributed among shareholders, not workers. If not, investors will simply invest their money elsewhere. There is no incentive, for example, for clothing manufacturers to make clothes in Australia, a country with sweatshop legislation and a minimum wage. No worries, investors simply go to Bangladesh, where unions are stamped out at the source.

This is free-trade liberalism. The freedom you describe applies to shareholders, not workers. This is how capitalism works. To make profit and attract investors, you must either exploit a slave class of workers or develop robots to do the job instead.