I'm not about to complain about my software development job in the US, but if not for job insecurity I'd rather clerk (not even own) at some small retail shop in Europe. And yes I've done "menial" jobs—take away the stresses of US healthcare and retirement systems and worries about your kids' ability to pay for school, add European amounts of time-off, and lots of those jobs are pretty damn great, actually, job-insecurity aside (which is not a trivial thing, I grant—point is about what's "fulfilling" or satisfying in a job).
[EDIT] sense 5 in Webster's 1913. Apparently it is, or at least was, a US usage.
5. An assistant in a shop or store. [U. S.]
Contrast that with my FAANG job I have now. The pay is phenomenal. But it basically swallows my life. Between the long hours, weekend on-calls, constant churn, all for a customer I've only spoken to indirectly via a project manager. It's hard to feel like the work you're putting out is really making a difference in anyone's life. With covid and the lack of direct human contact as well, I'd go so far as to say I'm practically pushing commits into a void everyday and getting paid for it, there's very little if any feedback for my work. First-world problems, I know. But if you took away the pay differences, I know which job I'd choose in a heartbeat.
Let us not kid each other. For most people their "work" is not a choice. The system is set up so that it is either you take whatever job you can to survive, or it is homelessness and no health benefits for you and your kids.
And no, pointing out that nobody should 'need' to work 2 full time shit jobs to merely put food on the table and meet rent isn't "Marxism". We are producing more "wealth" per capita than at any point in history (at the cost of destroying the planet btw), but still we require burned out elderly workers to keep at it until they literally die.
We used to have, at least in Europe, capitalism combined with a strong social security in healthcare, schooling and basic provisions for those at the bottom, financed through a progressive taxation regime at the top end. This worked fairly well for all. Yes, there were huge differences in lifestyle affordance between the poor and the very rich, but nobody needed to be homeless or without healthcare. While ofc tax-evasion was a thing, it wasn't ultra-weaponized like it is today.
If you think of extreme communism as a horizontal line and extreme capitalism as a vertical line, the old model was more like a sigmoid on the contribution/reward plane. Moderation is best in all things.