This. HN skews towards professionals and people with decent negotiating power.

Many people scrape paycheck to paycheck all their life. First, it is kids and housing, then as they age health. Plus, once you are 50 and all you did was factory work or gig work....your negotiating position is "I will do anything to get to the retirement".

It is a mistake to conflate the truth of my statements with the circumstances of the speaker.

Yep. And even if everybody met whatever arbitrary "diligent/hardworking/intelligent" line that the commenter you're replying to requires in order to treat people like fucking human beings there still wouldn't be enough jobs paying a livable wage to employ everyone. Their line of argument is naive at best.

Treating people like human beings involves letting them make their own choices in life.

Some people are too naive/uneducated/dumb/pressured to make decisions which are in their own best interests.

Raising the bar for employment conditions should help everyone.

A "living" rather than "minimum" wage wpuld help, but the businesses sponsoring governments round the world don't seem to want that.

It's very hard to get out of a place of desperation and poverty. Few people take the time to help.

>barely literate, living paycheck to paycheck and raising children

How about we focus on the issue that we're paying people working 40 hours a week, every week, for months on end not making enough money to reasonably survive?

That's because of their bad negotiating position though, which is the point. We can do both, since one is the partial cause of the other.