The time needed to get $1 in international dollars is 63 minutes in the US. This is about twice the average in Germany, France and the UK according to an Oxford University researcher. This suggests that average poverty is significantly higher in the US.
It’s entirely missing the point because offshore scuba diving is highly skilled specialized labour. It doesn’t matter whether it’s not very complex work when you get down to it. You need years to even get access to it and it has always been like this. The “bureaucratic red tape” has only been added so that the employers can acutually assess the skill of the people they hire. It’s a field where mistakes are very, very expensive.
Maybe you’ll understand what’s wrong with your example when I present you an equally bad example: I know a guy who works two months and then spends three months scuba diving in Egypt. He’s a doctor.
Look, you don’t need to explain the details to me, as I am a scuba diver myself and have seriously considered getting into commercial diving 10-15 years ago. Hence me knowing some people that actually do this.
As I said, it is difficult to get into it and there is a lot of certificates you need to do, but at the end of the day it isn’t super difficult to do and the job itself is mainly relatively well paid because there is a certain risk involved and you spend a lot of time away from home often even cramped into small submersible habitats.
A doctor is a very bad example indeed, because most doctors have fixed jobs they can’t easily leave for longer time periods.