There's a lot to unpack there. The feedback cycle between theory and practice is very interesting.

I would expect the Austrians to give more weight to the on-the-ground experience of people who do the work than the empirical schools of economics. That's an ironic reality, but the empiricists will dismiss what they're told with "the plural of anecdote is not data". In other words, workers' observations are not gathered in an experimentally rigorous way, which leads empiricists to simply dismiss them.

An Austrian would more likely appreciate that work processes evolve over time to reflect economic reality and changes observed by workers first-hand are evidence that economic reality may have changed.

One of the core tenets of the Austrian School is epistemological humility, which means being humble about what you claim to know. They recognize that economics is too complex to be modelled precisely, so they aren't going to make the kinds of overreaching claims that neoclassical or Keynesian economists make.

The technical meaning of "bias" is "a tendency to make errors in a particular direction". It isn't about coming into an investigation with prior beliefs. If your beliefs are true, then you won't be biased. If you come in with no prior beliefs, you won't have any idea what questions to ask.

To me the Austrians are by far the least biased school of economics, because they make the fewest simplifying assumptions in their theory. All those economists you were talking about being dismissive of how local economies would be affected by manufacturing loss were overconfident in the assumptions in their models. Those assumptions are the source of their biases, but they would tell you that those assumptions were backed by data.

I agree! It's a lot of fun for me.