The striking fast-food workers around America are making a claim pretty much everyone concedes: It's hard to make a living on a burger flipper's wages.

But their argument for getting paid more to flip burgers (and perform other nonmanagerial duties at fast-food joints) is not-so-widely accepted. It relies chiefly on the belief one does not necessarily get paid what one deserves in today's America, but rather only what the company's owners can get away with paying.

In fact, those two things are virtually the same. If the striking fast-food workers could go get other jobs that paid more, they presumably would -- and the restaurant owners might have to find a way to pay more to attract replacements. But the workers apparently can't, and so the owners are paying what the market will bear. In any case, railing against "McDonald's" and its corporate profits, for instance, ignores the fact that the vast majority of McDonald's restaurants are owned and operated by individual franchisees. These small businesses' profits and economic challenges will vary from location to location, but it's a safe bet cheap labor is a key part of their business model.

If some fast-food restaurants do end up raising their minimum wages, it will probably come at the expense of total employment. That's what's happening in Europe, where workers earn more, but an increasing number of them, such as cashiers, are seeing their jobs disappear because new technology is cheaper.

The better question is why, in 2013, seven in 10 fast-food workers are at least 20 years old and some 84 percent of the industry's workers have at least a high-school diploma. Some of those employees are probably managers and make somewhat better pay, but why are people with high school educations and more resorting to work at the bottom of the American job ladder?

There may be a lot of answers, but the two most germane are probably the condition of the U.S. economy and the state of U.S. education.

President Obama touts that the economy has added 6.7 million jobs since hitting its low-water mark for jobs in February 2010. What he doesn't like to discuss so much is that these new jobs have been disproportionately part-time and/or low-paid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports "limited service restaurants," to look at our current case, employ 2.8 percent of all nonfarm workers -- but they've accounted for 6.6 percent of all nonfarm job growth since February 2010. Such disproportionate growth toward the bottom of the jobs market reflects the strength, or lack thereof, of our economic "recovery" over the past four years.

Education bears another big share of the blame. Graduates can't help which jobs are being created. But too many of them are leaving high school with diplomas, but without the ability to pursue more skilled work or further education. There are industries that need more workers but can't find enough of them. It is a bad sign that so many high-school graduates have to settle for fast-food jobs rather than being, or putting themselves, in position to land more lucrative work. Some of these workers may have only themselves to blame. But if the large numbers of high school graduates in need of remedial work upon entering college are any indication, a great many of them may also be leaving high school with the belief they've received the education they need to pursue bigger goals and dreams -- only to find they're actually ill-prepared for the world.

There may not be a lot about these two factors -- not to mention others -- that today's fast-food workers can do at this point. But for the rest of us to pretend the answer is simply for franchise owners to open up their wallets a bit more, thereby putting their entire businesses and all those jobs at risk, is to consign future high school graduates to the same bleak future.