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Notes -
Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"
Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.
Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.
I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.
Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.
To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.
I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).
As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.
Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.
There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.
@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.
Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.
In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.
The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.
It's called paradox of value, or water-diamond paradox (water is a lot more useful than diamonds, but the price of diamonds is higher).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value
I have never understood what is so paradoxical about the "diamond–water paradox." Or why it's so religiously cited by libertarian adjacent people.
Asking why water is cheaper than diamonds is like asking why are housing construction parts cheaper than built houses. Wow, such a "paradox." Besides the obvious, imagine a world where housing parts were cheaper than houses. Very soon all houses would be stripped for the more precious copper and wood beams inside. Until society reasserts itself to sanity and "revalues" houses more than wood piles.
Similarly, imagine a world where diamonds really were cheaper than water. 1 of 3 reality outcomes emerges, it seems to me.
Everyone dies very quickly as a cup of water is equivalent to a cup of diamonds, meaning only a couple dozen people on earth can consume water regularly enough to survive. Lots of fighting occurs.
Diamonds are actually super common and worth less than a bottle of water, despite maybe being acknowledged by some as pretty. Like smooth stones or pinecones.
Diamonds are still relatively rare but regarded as fairly worthless and uninteresting. Akin to a seashell with a unique pattern.
Any attempt to abrogate these possibilities will be smacked down and reasserted by reality. Diamonds simply CAN'T be cheaper than water for any length of time - at least in a 1 scenario. Like with the houses and their parts, water is priced in as an underpinning of pretty much all economic activity, because it's necessary for life. It needs to therefore be trivially cheap or free. When you buy a house, you are buying an equivalent amount of water to keep everyone hydrated in its production. When you buy diamonds, you are buying water it takes to harvest and maintain them, up until the point where they enter your hands.
Where's the paradox? This doesn't seem hard to see, to me.
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