We don't even have an economic system that pays well or treats people humanely...
If you really don't know, I'm not your research assistant so I won't go look up things like universal health care and the social support strategies of various European countries for you. If you're just trying to bait me into some sort of pedantic argument, I'm far past the age where I felt compelled to interact with people who think being deliberately obtuse is a valid conversation tactic. Either way, I'm going to let you finish this one yourself. Have a fantastic sunday.
It's not like that in order to suggest that something is bad there must be an existing better version. The suggestion can be about creating that better version.
That of course is a general answer to your asking for a comparison, as if lack of one would refute the point.
Some country first abolished child labour, even when all others still had it. Where the people who advocated for that misguided, since they didn't have a better example to "compare" to?
These are of course also concrete answers to your question, like many EU countries where the vacation period is one month, where there are better employee protections, where there is less discrimination, where overtime is frowned upon and the work culture is not the US "grind", where waiters don't have to make do on tipping, and so on.
They don't have to be perfect in everything either (because an easy knee jerk critique would immediately point to some other shortcomings in their work arrangements). For the point of the suggestion, it's enough that they have better aspects than some country like the US could also adopt.
While we have no idea at all of any interventions that only achieves the partial result you want.
People of all backgrounds will find that non-painful survival is still profoundly unfulfilling and will continue to innovate, create, work. I think the fear of succumbing to the elements in America is too real and that that fear is a massive drain on the economy and the spirit of our people.
What's interesting are the libertarian types who want the opposite. You don't get anything by default, you have to fight for everything. All I can think of is 1) why? and 2) is that really their vision of the future? Like in 100 years we'll still have to work meaningless jobs just to put food on our table? Is that really the future we want?
Sometimes those hierarchies are natural and essential (race, gender, age, whatever), sometimes they're contingent and constructed (skillset, grindset, 'hard work', whatever), but it always has the same end result: they think that you can categorise people like insects, and that some groups of people deserve better things than others. Naturally they believe they would not be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
You may also be interested in the term 'capitalist realism'.
Western civilization has brought more food, clean water, and rescued more people from poverty in the 20th century than the entire history of human civilization. None of that was done by offering guarantees, it was achieved through free market capitalism. Competing economic systems that offered the guarantees you’re describing not only slaughtered millions and caused mass starvation but collapsed from economic dysfunction.
I'm generally a supporter of capitalism, but I think present conditions could be improved to facilitate that competition. Workers need to be able to use public transit in peace, which means getting homeless people out. We need to be able to offer shelter so that forceful removal is justifiable. Children need unequivocal access to nutrition so that malnourishment doesn't impair their ability to compete in the arena of idea-generation and in the knowledge economy. I think if the government were in the business of offering floors on quality of life that people could spend their time more productively instead of solving the same hunter-gatherer types of problems individually over and over again. Food insecurity may have been the impetus for work in the past, but I believe that status insecurity can replace it going forward. Nobody needs to starve for the West to prosper.