Wages in a free market have nothing to do with merit. They are nothing more than the supply-demand equilibrium rate for a given position. Employers are paying you as little as they can based on how hard it would be to replace you. Whether or not that equates to something livable is irrelevant.
Here’s a crazy idea: let’s all reject dollars as compensation, and insist on having our labor recorded in a timebank as straight person-hours, and also insist that the prices of goods be expressed in the cumulative person-hours required to produce them. We would buy and sell in person-hours instead of a fiat currency.
The positives:
– This doesn’t require legislative action or complicity. With a large enough group of workers getting on board, this could be done at a grassroots level. This is the general strike demand that you’re looking for.
– The goal is simple: insist only on compensation in person-hours instead of dollars. We don’t have to agree on what minimum wage should be, what a living wage is, what parental leave should look like, how much PTO or how many sick days one should get, and so on.
– Refusing dollars will make the dollar worthless. The extremely wealthy will become completely average overnight.
– Wage discrimination would be impossible. Racism and sexism would be eliminated, as far as pay is concerned.
– There would be no classes. Everyone’s standard of living would be directly and equivalently proportional to how many hours they choose to work, whatever their job.
– If the cost of healthcare was expressed in terms of person-hours involved, and not “what the market will bear, with the help of the insurance industry”, healthcare would be affordable out of pocket.
– The banking industry would vanish.
The downside:
-You’ll have to consider everyone around you as your equal.