Not all work is worth a living wage, and not all workers are in need of that. If you try to force that, the work will either just not get done or it will be automated, and more people will be unemployed.

Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers is valuable even if the work itself requires little skill.

> Not all work is worth a living wage.

And there we have it. "I don't view your work as being valuable enough to justify you being able to obtain basic needs for yourself (like food and shelter), let alone a family. Now give me my frappe."

Funny how we will still call such employees "essential" when it's time to force them to work in shitty and potentially dangerous conditions.

Sweeping the floor at a factory is just not a high value job. Anyone can do it, and if you demand that they pay $40/hr with full benefits they will just buy industrial Roombas and deprive someone of a job he may have been happy to have as a first job or for supplemental income.

>if you demand that they pay $40/hr with full benefits

>a job he may have been happy to have as a first job or for supplemental income

You are contradicting yourself here. Those two conditions don't occur at the same time.

did you overlook the "or" in my sentence?

No. Someone who's happy to have a first job OR as supplemental income is not going to demand $40/hr with full benefits in those sectors. You are using a completely hypothetical scenario to justify exploiting children.

Ok I misread your conment. I was responding to those who seem to think that any job should be able to support a family, or should not be permitted to exist. Not supporting exploitation of children, dont know where that came from.

A significant chunk of the userbase here work in jobs that use <flavour of the month> frameworks "reinventing" the <flavour of the year> stack because it will totally "disrupt" some completely saturated market, in companies averaging less than 12 months inbetween pivots and still earning less than 60¢ in revenue per $1 cost more than five years after founding because they hire Stanford grads to write CRUD apps at a per person cost of starting entire small businesses. Of course they feel the need to validate the existence of their own jobs by shitting on "low skill" jobs that have actually been essential to keep our society functioning especially over the last 3 years.

Speak for yourself, my first jobs were flipping burgers and making pizza. Both "low skill" and paid accordingly. I could not have supported a family on those jobs but I was not trying to and they gave me experience and references as to my work ethic and character that were helpful in gaining higher skill, higher paying jobs.

>my first jobs were flipping burgers and making pizza.

Can you read the article first before typing out your next comment? Those jobs have always hired teens without these imminent changes to child labour laws. You are defending something that hasn't changed, and isn't relevant to what people are concerned about as reported in the article link in this thread.

If the work is not worth a living wage, then it does not need to be done. Simple as that.

Except, obviously, this work is worth kicking wage, because we want to eat meat.

>Not all work is worth a living wage

They are not, that's why minimum wage has lagged behind livable wage standards in the United States and Canada for decades, because minimum wages aren't livable wagges.

>the work will either just not get done or it will be automated

But I thought the free market runs itself? If an employee is bad they'd be gone in an eyeblink, so if a job is bad, why should it be allowed continued existence? Unemployment is at historical lows which is part of the reason why these awful jobs with awful pay can't be filled.

>Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers

There are plenty of adults who work in """high value jobs""" failing all of that every, single, day. Some of them are here in this very thread advocating for child labour despite not having a single minute of experience working in any of these jobs that are about to exploit children.

> Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers is valuable even if the work itself requires little skill.

You can learn this anywhere... in fact, I think there's a place where children can go that they're supposed to be on time, listen to staff, follow instructions, and get along with others. It's called school, dummy.

I can always tell when I’ve hired someone who did not grow up working actual jobs when they were young. School is not an adequate substitute for what you learn punching a clock.

'Why are the jobs "low value"'

Could be several different reasons that all boil down to supply/demand and leverage.

In the article, it's claimed that many businesses can't afford to pay more, which is fairly believable for small businesses and for industries with global price pressures. The workers can't find better jobs, so they take whatever they can get.

"why don't those who do them deserve to make ends meet?"

They do, but society can't get it together to balance interests in a way that works for everyone (if that's even possible). Also, $15/hr should be fairly doable in a rural area.

> businesses can't afford to pay more

That's what we should call a "Low value" business, which is actually what many businesses and entire industries are in the real world. Restaurants say they can't find workers, when the truth is pay and work conditions cannot attract workers. They say they can't afford to pay higher salaries, the response is "then raise prices". They say "then we'll lose our customers". Good! The business is not valuable enough and that means customers have to do without.

There is absolutely no need to continue with low value economic activity.

You seem to be missing the supply/demand and leverage part. Workers take the low value positions because they don't have an alternative. Not to mention the consumer culture of racing to the bottom. You'd have to fix those for the low value businesses to go under. Of course stuff like farm work and grocery stores are low paying, so it's not like they're just going to disappear.

> Workers take the low value positions because they don't have an alternative.

I'd like to correct that with "they believe they don't have an alternative." Almost all of them can get a better job, and that's why they are leaving bad employers and bad industries. Information is traveling faster than ever right now, and people are waking up. Gone are the generations of older people recommending a young person to take a shit job. Instead they are getting advice from the middle generations who have already been burned to stay far away from these jobs. Even people at the bottom have mobility and will go where better opportunities are found.

> Of course stuff like farm work and grocery stores are low paying, so it's not like they're just going to disappear.

Farm work has been massively automated with tractors and harvesters, those jobs have mostly disappeared. Today but a tiny percentage of the work force are employed in farming, when before it was the majority of the population. Grocery stores have changed as well. When before there were clerks handing goods over the counter, now people grab their products from shelves.