Depends on what you call hard work. Any able bodied worker can lift things. There's lots of able bodied workers so that's why wages are low. Supply and demand applies to labor as much as it does to products. Gain some knowledge and be willing to take on responsibility and wages will go up because there are less people willing to do that.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would call what EMTs do incredibly hard work, not only physically, but mentally, and emotionally. They need extensive training, knowledge, and certifications. And they get paid dogshit wages.

Retail and customer service is incredibly hard work, too, when you account for emotional labor. And a big proportion of them don't want to be doing it, and would put in the effort to gain knowledge and take on responsibility, but they're barred from it by systemic factors.

Social workers, too, need a master's degree for shit pay in highly stressful situations. Teachers, similar. Pilots and firefighters, too. Lawyers as well are feeling the pinch. Even doctors are struggling under heavy student loan debt. (And have among the highest suicide rates of any profession.)

Jeff Bezos, by contrast, did not work hard. He got the chance to go to Princeton, then studied comp sci because physics was too hard. He had connections to become a VP of a hedge fund by age 26. The company assigned him the project of investigating potential retail opportunities on the nascent Web. He saw the possibilities, but was unable to convince the company. So he left, and became an early mover in online retail, and his new company was profitable within a month. A month of stuffing books in mailers with almost no risk (his fallback would've been a job with a six-figure salary) because he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with resources to take advantage of it is not hard work.

He is unusual in his middle-class origin. Class mobility is very low in the United States. Typically, the upper class member is somebody born into that class, whose parents were able to purchase opportunities for them (tutors, essay writers, legacy admissions, sports scholarships, etc.), and provide them with connections in the upper strata of society. No doubt it is expensive to produce a new member of the upper class, but none of that is hard work, in my book.

The examples are countless, and as they show, pay is only weakly correlated with effort.