The arguments on labor being a free market or not usually get muddied up by mixing economic and metaphysical freedoms. It's postulated that since people HAVE to trade their skills to survive, that they aren't "free." I suppose by the same token people can never be truly "free" since they must eat, drink, and breath to live. Someone with a lot of survival knowledge on a desert island can live on their own without being dependent on trading for anyone else's skills, but as a lifestyle, I wouldn't recommend it.

So, as far as the realm of economics goes, supply and demand works for people as much as anything else.

To oversimplify a bit, janitor work doesn't pay much because there are four billion people on the planet who can do janitor work. A pro quarterback gets millions of dollars because about a hundred people on the planet are good pro quarterbacks. So it goes.

The "shittiness" of the job has nothing to do with it. It's the skill set. Dealing with nuclear waste at a reprocessing plant is a shitty job, but I bet it pays pretty damn good.

The amount of "hands on" work involved in a job also has little to do with it. I would bet a first rate diamond cutter gets paid more than a lot of people in cubicles. Hell, I know for a fact some plumbers get paid more than a lot of people in cubicles. The proverbial "guys who know where to hit things with the hammer" out there in the industrial world rake in quite a bit. From my own field of work, guess what you have to pay a skilled titanium welder, or someone who can safely machine beryllium.

We have been horribly spoiled in this country. We look at an immigrant from the Third World emptying waste baskets and think how bad off he is. Nobody ever asks him what he was doing before he got here.

Believe me, people from around the planet aren't crowding into America because they're looking for worse conditions than they had where they used to live.

Post-war America was comfortably insulated from planetary market forces. Most of the rest of the industrialized world was a load of craters. We could happily pay a bolt-turner a middle-class wage and outrageous benefits. No real competition. Japan was making tin toys and cheap radios. Europe was barely making anything at all. China and India were subsistence economies. Most of our oil still came from American wells, and most of our products were made in the USA.

That's not true any more. The rest of the world got better, richer, more educated, and more skilled. Things are a bit rougher for the Eternals now that the force field is down and the Brutals are competing for the same work.

Eventually it will balance out. Those keeping track will have noticed that nations that used to be "cheap labor" havens have progressed to the point where their own companies are outsourcing to even cheaper places as standards of living and labor expectations have risen. At some point, years from now, the water will have found its level.

You would think the champions of the world's Downtrodden Masses would be cheering this progression on.