My first salary about 12 years ago was around 35-40$ in today's money. Back then the average salary was about 120-200$, now the average salary here is about 250-400$.
I was 17 years old before the last year of highschool, worked for a month in a shoe factory placing shoes in boxes, boxes in crates, crates in trucks etc etc ... so I was basically a packer with no qualifications.
I actually got paid more than the workers in the warehouse, because while they had bigger wages, they also paid taxes and fees for retirement, health insurance, union fees etc etc
Nowadays my monthly salary I pay to myself (I work as a freelancer) is in the tens of hundreds of dollars range..