Really there is just a housing shortage. Every road of struggling lower/middle class finances leads back to housing being outrageously expensive. All these other costs/wages are in mostly functional and liquid markets. They are being priced/valued more or less correctly.

Except housing. It's artificially choked to bolster home values by home owners.

Pay is part of the problem, but also prioritizing profit margin above all else.

The fundamental problem is if you understaff and overwork your employees, you make more money. The actual drop in quality for the service doesn't degrade enough to stop people from using it.

This is why hospitals are horror stories of nurses/doctors working 60+ hour weeks with no vacation and managing a huge patient load. It's because admin has found that even if you don't have enough nurses, that just means 1 or 2 patients suffer or wait in line for longer. Perhaps someone dies, but in the meantime you'll save 10s, 100s of thousands or even millions of dollars over the course of a year.

It's a pay problem, but it's also a staffing problem.

Working conditions too. Pretty bad for nursing and teaching.