This is why it infuriates me so much when people argue that some jobs, “Aren’t meant to pay well and live on.”

From the social standpoint: then if that’s your argument, anyone looking to support themselves had better be able to find a job that pays better for the skills they have. This not being the case, it suggests that these people are in fact trying to support themselves, they’ve just found themselves on the wrong side of the capitalist meat grinder, and the argument of the job being one that “isn’t supposed to support you” is nothing more than a distraction so you don’t have to say the real reason: because you’d rather have the person that serves your diner breakfast be trapped in an endless cycle of poverty than pay an extra dollar for your meal. You’re complicit in the process and you like it.

From the individual standpoint: ignoring for a moment the questions of who gets to decide these sorts of things and where the cutoff lies…isn’t it really just creating a convenient circular excuse for greed? These jobs have low pay because they’re not meant to support oneself on…but the reason they’re not meant to support oneself on is because they have low pay? And that’s good enough of an explanation?! People, especially older boomers, like to paint with broad strokes and imply that service industry jobs are “for teenagers in the summer and college kids putting themselves through school”, as a way to somehow justify low pay. Now regardless of the demographics of the employee (and we won’t even touch the idea of working at any job, much less service industry, to pay for college as you attend in this day and age)… regardless of all that…doesn’t it make sense that whoever is doing the work, if the same work is being done the pay should be the same? Granted there’s room for seniority, experience, skill, dependability, etc. but the point I’m getting at here is: isn’t it ridiculous to say that a kid should be paid less for doing a given job just because they’re a kid?

And regardless of where you stand on the exploitation of child labor, either answer leads you back to the same point: either it’s not okay to exploit kids, so kids should make the same as an adult for the same work, so we can pay these workers fairly…or you think it is okay to exploit child labor, in which case, that only makes it okay to short the kids’ pay…not the adults. Either way, the only explanation left for subsistence pay for adults is: the system is victimizing the working poor like an elephant sized parasite latched onto an ant, and justifying it by suggesting that if the ant doesn’t like it they should just try, you know, making more money.