To complicate matters, when I was a student in the public school system, economics lessons were eschewed by teachings that salary is determined by skill level, starting with the lowest skilled workers being paid minimum wage and increasing from there.

Now that my age cohort is older and the ones who are now often running the businesses, I expect many of them are still hanging onto those false ideas. If they see the work as requiring low to medium skill, they are only going to offer low to medium pay as that is what they were taught they are supposed to do.