[ggm]

I am not mentioning it. I can't think of any Western democracy who pays these people well, I don't see it as fundamentally undermining the point.

Of course they should be better paid. I hold a belief kindergarten teachers should be paid more than high school teachers, or at least as much.

If we want to die of lack of sanitation, not paying people to clean up is a good way of getting there faster. And so on: these low pay jobs are anything but unimportant: they're just jobs we don't seem willing (societally) to pay for or do, hence persisting underemployment by less educated and demotivated working classes in europe: intergenerational unemployment is a trap.

[UweSchmidt]

Market mechanisms attract people from poorer countries to do the work for cheap, depressing the wages in the relevant sectors.

Employers, and people in jobs that are currently safe benefit from that (cheap food, cheap construction, cheap service) and therefore "hold beliefs" over how things should be, or why society strangely just doesn't seem willing to pay more...

[kichimi]

It undermines your point on a technicality, there are more than enough qualified lorry drivers in the UK (by the numbers), they just cannot survive on the wages being offered.

Other than that I think we are in agreement.