You’ve hit the crux of the issue. Most people who push for these types of social changes have rarely been involved in the hard work.
They’re the “ideas” person. Same people who wanna give you 5% of their amazing idea so you can implement it.
I don’t really know anyone who hates their line of work or lacks interest in their field (plenty in their job, but not their field).
That’s probably because I only know salaried professionals/soon to be professionals (interns).I suspect many others are in the same boat.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
Toilet cleaners, garbage men and fruit pickers should not just be paid well for the important work they do; they should be given respect for it as well.
Taking advantage of their desperation is absolutely unjust.
Is that a bad thing?
One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.
(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)
Easy, look at US's GDP ($68k) and compare it against a country that's proportionately lower (to 15 hours). That gets you around $25k, around the GDP of Bulgaria and Chile.
However, that gave me the idea to see what that same math was like using historical U.S. inflation adjusted per-capita GDP numbers [0].
That $25k number is what U.S. per-capita GDP was in 1991/1992.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?