That would be the absent Obama "economic recovery" jobs.
The minimum wage and low skill jobs aren't there because of some poorly negotiated free trade agreements made during the 1990s. (The minimum wage in India is about $689 per year!) Since we can't compete with places like India for low cost labor, that means that we need to compete by being able to do things that they can't do. And the problem with that is rooted in the dismal performance of the US public school system, and the resulting lack of basic skills and knowledge of many graduates. The majority of Americans have been poorly served by their government's policies on a number of different levels.
More time spent learning less, for sure. Mandatory public education in Japan ends at age 14. Of course, their junior high kids have an education equivalent to or better than most of our high school kids by then.
They have a week in fall, another in spring where the kids go to work for local businesses. It is part of the assigned education. Most of them will continue on to high school, but even those who don't get a decent idea of what entry level work is like.
My daughter who went to Japanese public junior high found the experience highly useful. Most of the kids want to go to famous name companies (McDonald's, as I recall, was a top choice but too cheap to even give their free labor a free meal), so random drawing is used to decide who gets what is left. My daughter was fortunate to get a small family-owned steak house as one of the leftovers. They treated her very well and when the whole family showed up a week or two later as a "thank you", they gave us a huge discount on the meal.