Seeing kids work is not right by our standards but people have to eat. Luckily I hardly ever see that here. But I see a lot of people that are willing to work, even if the job is unnecessary by your definition: Cleaning windscreens, carrying bags, singing or other artistic presentations, selling candy or water...
I give them money, they are part of this society and most of the time they did not choose this route. I would like to do more but unfortunately my time is very limited.
While you're right that the system needs to change, giving the shoeshine boy a peso might be the best help that someone in GP's position could have given.
Their life is still terrible, but at least they're not hungry for a night.
>Sadly this sometimes only happens when the oppressed party suffers enough to elicit real sympathetic action or in extreme cases an uprising.
That's really dark, man, and I don't think it's true. Plenty of groups have won their rights without being deliberately ground into the dirt by another section of society.
>This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior
I run a retail business, and much of what we sell is like this. Even for things that have utility (e.g. a washing machine), the price you'd pay at a retail store is often (but not always) significantly higher than the value of the good itself sold on, say, Facebook Marketplace. A "$2000 washing machine" is often just a $600 washing machine plus $1400 worth of making the customer feel special.
You can say this is wrong or wasteful, but it's part of human nature and exists across all cultures.
>donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.
Steve Hughes argues against this better than I ever could:
As you didn't hire them, presumably your shoes didn't need shining so they were not really performing a necessary function anyway. This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior instead of donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.