Actually, I'd say this is a long-term problem that we won't solve until we stop expecting everyone to have a job and figure out some way to distribute out to everyone a piece of the value created by automation.
Some day we are going to expect only some people to have to work for a living? How are we going to choose the poor saps that have to work while the robots feed all the rest of us while we sit by our swimming pools?
A few other countries have it more-or-less figured out the basics, though without this future need in mind. Countries with a "guaranteed basic income" do this. There's also Milton Friedman's "Negative Income Tax" idea. At some point, we're going to be looking at world where few /people/ are honestly needed to do anything, and we will in fact need a way to support them. The post-scarcity society envisioned by some is probably no longer centuries away.
What's more interesting is how thinkers from various political persuasions have had their opinions on the matter converge to this answer while the dominant narratives (in the US at least) stay centered on variants of no-rules early Capitalism (Republicans/Libertarians), neo-Mercantilism (China), or 1950s union-jobs-for-life (Democrats), all of which seem increasingly untenable. Watch this (starts getting really interesting around 1:00) for more:
Simple: we don't set it up like that, with the few as slaves to the many. We just distribute a basic living to everyone, shorten the length of the work necessary for "full-time" status (or ideally abolish the distinction between part-time and full-time), and let anyone who wants extra go work for it.
