Just pick the one you consider most qualified, there is no need to have the number of applicants match the number of jobs. But this is actually besides my point which is that even though menial jobs are often the harder, more unpleasant, or whatever jobs they are also often the worst payed for jobs because there is an oversupply of workers and this is used against them.
Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening.
My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.
Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that.
People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.
Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs.
For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.
The problem with that is if you don't let the supply and demand price be the price, you create other issues. Like what to do about the excess or undersupply of whatever you are looking at.
I'm not denying that the price can seem wrong. Who really thinks that sports stars ought to make 20x what a doctor makes?
The problem is in my opinion that the price fulfills too many tasks at once, it is a measure of work and resources required for the production of goods, it is used as measure of value or utility a consumer assigns to the goods, it is used to decide how goods of limited supply are distributed, and there may be more things upon careful inspection. The problem is that those aspects do not align in a good way all the time and that there are no or no strong enough forces to fix this.
Look at pay scales in the former Soviet Union. In demand workers were still paid more but the state guaranteed a job for everyone and poverty was quite low - and average difference between a well-to-do person and a working class person was not huge (though I guess the living arrangements back then could be considered "poverty" today). Labor / Other salaries are always a choice (although the USSR experienced lots of brain drain because of their choices, so maybe it doesn't work too well with open borders)
(even though there were many other problems, and eventually the planned economy bit and large foreign-denominated loans backed by plummeting oil made the whole thing collapse like a house of cards)
This sounds to me exactly like a nice-sounding in the short-term but ultimately unsustainable system to me. That some of the most anti-socialist places in the world are ex-territories of the soviet union doesn't give me much confidence in the soviet way there.
Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening.
My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.