This actually isn't true. But it sounds true if you only think about things from an employers perspective. The problem in labor markets right now is that wages are below what a free market would pay. Or in other words, we have to think about pay as a negotiation between workers and employers. If there's no competition for labor, companies can set wages at whatever level they want, so they set employee wages much below the market rate. They do not pass these savings on to consumers - why would they? - so the net result is lower wages and higher prices for everyone. The fancy economics word for this is 'decline in purchasing power'. People today, at the low end, make less and pay more. And that's been going on for decades.
This is, incidentally, why studies show that wage increases (at the level living wage proponents argue for) are not inflationary. Instead, the minimum wage corrects the failure of labor markets and leads to an economy that both pays workers more and is more efficient.
This isn't a problem. Automation makes workers more productive and frees them up to do other jobs. What we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have workers being paid low wages to do jobs that they're not able to do as well as they otherwise would be. The reason for that has nothing to do with the employees, and everything to do with the fact that markets incentivize companies to engage in inefficient and non-competitive labor practices.
The actual numbers don't matter*. What matters is purchasing power. That's why the living wage is defined in terms of the costs of goods and services accounting for inflation.
*the rate of increase of the numbers does matter - high inflation scares people, even if purchasing power increases with it. No one is saying fixing these problems will be easy, but we should at least agree that these are problems that need to be fixed. Acting like hard working low wage earners are the problem isn't going to make these problems go away.
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