It took me a while to understand that work is not paid based on difficulty, but on labor supply and demand.
The reason why many very hard jobs pay so low is because there’s lots of people who will do them.
There’s an axiom about smart work > hard work but I think that oversimplifies too much.
I did manual labor for a few summers and it didn’t pay very well. I just didn’t understand why my work was so hard and paid so little and it frustrated me.
But understanding how wages work at the macro level gave me some mental peace.
There's a hell of a lot more to it than that. From hiring bias, to school bias, to class bias, to name bias, to area bias - from sheer propaganda to straight up coercion. From lobbying, to perverse subsidies, to externalization of costs, etc, etc, ad nauseaum.
"Understanding how wages work at the macro level gave me some mental peace."
Are you quite sure that said mental peace isn't blissful ignorance... Because ignorance is only blisfful to the ignorant. America's wages at the macro level are deeply, catastrophically, even systematically unjust, in horrifically short-sighted ways.
Of course there are micro instances with particulars to a situation, but the main driver for wages is supply and demand.
The reason the janitorial service only gets $12/hour is not a result of all the biases you mentioned, even though it’s hard work- unpleasant, time constrained, shift work hours. The wage is low because many, many people are capable of doing the job.
I’m not sure why you would think America’s wages are unjust. But that can exist at the same time as supply and demand issues. Perhaps it is unjust that people make too little, but the reason isn’t that the universe is an asshole. The reason is that lots of people are capable of doing jobs that are hard, so it’s easy to pay less.
So the injustice is because people need more skills and are only capable of taking jobs that lots of other people can do, and few demand.
But again, wages aren’t set based on difficulty, or value, or the intrinsic need for human dignity of the people performing them. Wages are set by supply and demand.
Exactly. I grew up poor and my teen employment was bust-your-ass jobs like factory and restaurant work. I was once on a contract for a large company, and throughout the day I'd watch the office employees enjoy quiet, pleasant days with plenty of chatting with coworkers. The most strenuous thing they'd do was occasionally rush from one meeting to another.
They'd all be gone by 5 and I'd stay working. Then I'd see the cleaning contractors come in and zoom through the office, working hard and never taking breaks. It always made me a little mad that most people there never even saw the hardest workers in the building, let alone appreciated them.