“No one should work full time and live in poverty.”
...for heavily modified definitions of poverty.
One of my friends just cannot understand the definition Americans use for poverty. He lived with his mother, a couple of Aunts, his cousins, in his grandfathers house, with the goats on the other side of the room to keep them from being eaten by the leopards. He never had shoes until he was 12. From his view, he wasn’t in poverty...he had goats, a family, and access to the river. He went to the local Catholic school in the mornings, where he learned to read and write in his native language and English.
And therein lies the problem: the definition of “poor” has been expanded to absurd levels. Some 87% of the world’s population meeds the legal US definition of “poor” (purchasing power parity corrections included).
The “war on poverty” has been won. The new problem is that “functional poverty” (as your friend lived in) has for most practical purposes been outlawed in most jurisdictions. Legislators have decided that independent living reasonably expected to continue indefinitely in decent health is far from sufficient, and that instead one have an array of what some 87% of the world would consider luxuries.