Plenty of people complain in a stealthy dog whistle way WRT real estate prices and high rental payments.
There's also the value proposition where I could make $15/hr at a McDonalds, so its hard to set a labor cost floor below $15/hr. I KNOW from experience that even when everything goes wrong I can replace a kitchen faucet in ten hours. Sure it starts out as an hours work but three trips to home depot later for strange wrenches and adapters and valves and next thing you know its ten hours. Thats an absolute minimum of $150 of lost income doing likely physically easier work standing at a mcdonalds cash register or whatever. Obviously I can make way more than $15/hr doing software development. On the other hand, a plumber has seen it all, has all the tools at his fingertips, and can do it in an hour for $150, and the hardest physical labor I'll have is writing a check.
Maybe a fair price for replacing a kitchen faucet is the hourly price of any other sweaty dirty technical complicated highly skilled tool/capital intensive job, which across the entire labor market seems to run $30/hr to $100/hr billed. If I were a $100K+ extremely highly experienced and trained diesel engine mechanic like my cousin, it would be financially foolish to turn down work to replace his own kitchen faucet. Even if he paid me a fraction of his hourly to haul around his toolbox and lift things for him as some kind of apprentice, I'm still honestly financially better off being a diesel mechanic's assistant than trying to replace the faucet myself.
Google shows union building and construction trades are ALL billing around $50/hr around here, plus or minus $10/hr related to lifestyle, I suppose. Picking a fight with the plumbers means picking a fight with the residential electricians and the ironworkers all making within a couple dollars per hour of each other. It is kinda shocking how all building trades make about the same hourly.
Of course Starbucks is a better working environment if you have a liberal arts degree and a mortgage sized student loan, and only pays $11.02 nationwide average. Almost any profession on a construction site will get you five times the pay achievable with a liberal arts degree... Yes a small fraction of liberal arts degree holders will get six figure sinecures, but then again a small, yet larger, fraction of plumbers will be multimillionaire business owners.