[legitster]

> high wages for those workers

Part of the problem is that for some of these jobs, there is only so much money an employee is able to generate. And for some industries you can only get away with raising prices so much (fast food is relatively easy to raise prices).

I have friends in the grocery industry and they are so hard up for workers (even unionized/good-paying ones) and the margins are already so razor thin that they are looking at starting to close the store on certain days of the week.

So even in unskilled positions, you are going to need huge increases in labor productivity. Which means more customers per employee. So bigger fast food places, bigger stores, bigger farms, bigger hospitals, etc.

[Eisenstein]

Australia has a real minimum wage almost twice that of the USA. Do they not have grocery stores there?

* https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW

> Real hourly and annual minimum wages are statutory minimum wages converted into a common hourly and annual pay period for the 30 OECD countries and six non-member countries for which they are available. The resulting estimates are deflated by national Consumer Price Indices (CPI). The data are then converted into a common currency unit using either US $ current exchange rates or US $ Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) for private consumption expenditures.

[arrosenberg]

> So even in unskilled positions, you are going to need huge increases in labor productivity.

Or you could tax the excess profits that companies are earning from eliminating jobs through automation and AI, use that money to pay for healthcare and cover subsidies to bring the cost of food and other necessities down. Then the cost of labor goes down and you don't need to torture people for more productivity.