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That doesn’t really make sense though. There is always a wage people will take to do dirty jobs (I would do them instead of my profession if the dirty jobs paid better) so leaving that aside is the economy argument. Your argument is basically an argument against paying any job a high wage. Trucking simply must be done. The economy must bear whatever labor (or automation when that becomes fully viable) cost is required to make the trucks move. If that is $100/hour for entry level truckers, then goods will become more expensive and that cost will be distributed across the economy accordingly. This will make all other people in the economy poorer, and it will make truckers or whatever other dirty-job-doers richer. It would also increase the quality of talent in those positions, resulting in efficiency gains (but probably somewhat lower gains than the cost increase). I think the reality is people just don’t want to see meatpackers and truckers making significantly more than they make with an email job and a degree .
That’s how any high paid job works. Doctor is a difficult-to-fill position, and so is paid highly, which makes all other people in the economy marginally poorer by increasing their expenses. If doctors were willing to work for 20$/hour, everyone else would be better off. They don’t do that, but maybe they would if we imported 1,000,000 foreign doctors and put them to work.
What is infeasible is any one company paying high wages for dirty jobs when there is a pool of cheap labor available due to competition.
For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.
That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.
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