I think you are letting your personal experience with "low value" jobs cloud your vision in this situation. Its great that you worked your way out and I am sure you deserve whatever position you are in now. However, I think there is some survivorship bias at play here.
> I understood exactly where I stood and why I was being paid.
I am sure that the people in the article know this as well, but that doesn't mean they are treated fairly. The way society is structured and businesses treat people is not just by default. If this was the case, there should be no worker protections and we should simply pay people "what they are worth", which, in the past, resulted in factory towns and child labor.
Nobody in the article is demanding more money by arguing it is the compassionate thing to do, they want pay _parity_ with their coworkers who do the same job, which is pretty different in my opinion. They also want to keep their jobs after 2 years instead of getting fired for basically no reason other than it saves Google money through a regulation loophole.
> I don’t think they need to make more money “just because.” It’s whatever the market bears.
We do not live in a free market economy by any means. The reason why these people are being treated so badly is because of a poorly thought out regulation. Acting as though the system is a "free market" is just an indirect way of justify oppression of workers under the current mixed market system
