I find this to be a lazy argument because the conclusion is that you should never try to improve your situation ever. Also the easy counter to this is to establish a welfare state by taxing profits across the board (not that this could successfully be done in the US).
The counter to that argument is that capital will flee overseas. The counter to that argument is to do what China did and remind the tech oligarchs who is really in charge. The counter to that argument is that it's bad to do that because property rights are sacred.
At the end of the day though, we should really want for all citizens to have as high of a living standard as possible. I think their humanity is a better argument than any alternatives that economists can come up with.
So, really, it cannot be well-paid. It's either crap pay or the job disappears.
This is a classic balancing act between jobs and workers protection/level of minimum wage.
This is classic late stage capitalism more than it is some "balancing act" imo.
If you compare the prices on doordash or similar apps to the prices inside the restaurant, you'll find that what you said just isn't true. It seems some people are comfortable paying more for the delivery than the food itself.
I think reasonable thing to always consider is how many deliveries does average person make in hour and then price of each of them. And after that remove taxes and expenses. Now could this be lived on or not is sensible question.
Though, I have to imagine, if there wasn't rent-seeking from the platform, and the driver got all of the fees charged to the user, the pay might not be as bad.
But overall, the market is that people are not willing to pay a lot for delivery, or perhaps if they order very rarely. Here in the UK I think you'd hard pressed to find delivery beyond £4 on, say, Delivery and average is lower than that.
Since delivery is factually low productivity wages cannot be anything but very low and this is compounded by the use of a middleman (the platform).
The scenario isn't "If you ask for more I'll automate you." It is that they'll automate them anyway when it is convenient for them to do so.
Same in a shop. It's far better for a machine to stack a shelf than for a person to do it, it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.
And in this hypothetical, you'd be in favor of paying that person now, right? Surely the machine doesn't need the money in exchange for the value of its labor.
In an ideal world all work would be done by automation, and everyone else would be free to do what they wanted for fun.
There's considerably less young people entering the workforce in the west now than there were 40 years ago.
Likewise, fertility rates may be going down, but we also have people working on all kinds of things in that area, including but not limited to artificial wombs.
Fertility rates are not down because people are infertile, they're down because people increasingly choose to not have children.
Automation isn't the problem, its control and use to create systems of extraction from the disadvantaged is.
A non-automated McDonalds extracts money from a certain population(the target market of the McDonald's) and funnels it to the owner, but the owner has to employ people(typically from the same area/market) to give some of that money back to.
Without those jobs, money is being extracted from the target market without any being given back.
Tax everybody at the rate that allows us to provide for those who are put out of work by automation, and let those who automate reap the rewards of that.
It's not technology's fault that we require people to do bullshit jobs in return for bullshit pay. It's that our secular religion of protestant capitalism is severely flawed. One day, all production will be automated, and 99% of the population will still be digging holes and filling them all day in return for their rations.
You have to tax differently because different productivity mechanisms have different societal value (not economic, importantly). There is a short story or proposal I recall consuming a long time ago about different types of money, one for things with no or low marginal cost, and one for things produced by humans. The former money would be printed and distributed somewhat freely, the latter not. Similar idea. If someone recalls a link to this idea, please comment!
We already have a lot of pointless jobs in the charade that we continue with.