Instead of improved job quality, the rewards for task-oriented workers are pats on the back and the constant encouragement to aspire for something better.

And of course, consumers suffer as well: When you witness a great restaurant server or see a particularly effective janitor at work, you aren’t observing a freak talent, but someone who took the time to learn his or her job and improve on it. Now imagine if more “low-skilled” workers were given the compensation, job security and encouragement to do the same.

In my work as a college instructor, I see students who aspire to do “better” than low-skilled work. Many are the sons and daughters of restaurant workers and housekeepers, the first in their family to attend college, and they choose the university in the assured belief that with their education, they will avoid the types of jobs their parents hold. One student recently told me that the sole reason he is pursuing a degree is because he doesn’t “want to work in a job that requires no skills.”

As much as I want to reassure him that his education will guarantee him that, I cannot. The fact is, more and more college graduates are going to end up in jobs that don’t draw on the skills they paid so much to get.

That’s all the more reason we need to be doing a better job of making low-skilled jobs worth having, above all by raising the minimum wage, and significantly more than current measures propose.

Such efforts are subject to endless debate over whether raising the minimum wage means inflation, decreased employment for younger workers and a more competitive market for task-oriented jobs.

But the more difficult challenge is to redefine the language and perceptions that trap large segments of reliable workers in poverty. All work can be executed with skill, but denying that fact is useful to those who justify the poor treatment of, and unfair compensation for, millions of workers.

Convincing those workers that their treatment is temporary, that if they just keep working harder, learn to do their tasks more quickly, more efficiently, more fluidly, they will eventually surpass it — this is a myth we can’t keep telling.