Because the American middle class has been eviscerated by globalization, pandemic, etc and these are the best, er least bad, jobs available to many of them. They don’t have any leverage or bargaining power, collective or individual.
+1 I have long been saying that part of why American jobs are so bad is because people keep taking them. Of course, this does ignore the realities of why they keep taking them.
Getting people to a place where they can say "No" to a bad deal should be a major goal for progressives and conservatives alike because it fits their model of how the world works -- progressives want people to have the stability of life and "good jobs" and conservatives like it when market forces are reasonably at play (enough workers are saying "no" to bad jobs and "yes" to good jobs)
im not sure how minimum wage workers are being branded middle class here. These are minimum wage workers. unfortunately they will have less choices through lack of education and opportunity.
Many of these minimum wage workers used to be blue collar workers making more than minimum wage and solidly middle-class. Then, en-masse their jobs got exchange-rate arbitraged (outsourced) to slave labor overseas making pennies an hour.
Keep in mind only 30% of the US population has a college degree, much less a graduate degree. More and more of that 70% are falling out of the middle class and struggling to survive.
