Nicole when she is not catfishing Lemmy users.
Skilled or unskilled. If you do a full day’s work, you should be able to support yourself and family.
We should also take care of those that are unable to do so.
No labor is unskilled it’s classist bullshit to make us think we’re better than each other. Farm work especially so since there are weird local tricks for local planting styles and crops.
When you start really thinking about it, often unskilled jobs are nearly all the necessary jobs for humanity to survive. No one is going to suffer if your PhD army can no longer update twitter, I’m afraid to name the percentage, but most skilled jobs are useless in the sense that they’re not really making anything of value.
I think SEO jobs are good example of this.
I disagree. Without Frtiz Haber inventing nitrogen fertilizer there wouldn’t even be people to do unskilled labor.
This class battle has to stop. All economic fields are productive given that the market is valuing it. What’s not productive is corruption and hoarding and middle manager fiddling. We have science to determine all that so we don’t even need to gut feel this out.
Someone researching “transgender mice” can low key add more value than thousands or millions of “unskilled laborers”. We need to diversify and value all avenues of our collective production and growth because thats just a smart thing to do. Except for billionaires and hoarders which clearly are a net negative.
Most peoples jobs in society are necessary I think. Doesnt matter if youre a construction worker or a programmer, we rely on all of it to eek out a better standard of living. How many people do you know have a job that isnt benefiting society in some way?
Me! I worked most of my life with 3D and Photoshop. Some stuff i did might have increased some sales, some might have been fun, but all were useless and mostly advertisement. I always wondered, if everyone working in ads died, what effect would it have on humanity? Rich people would be worse, but humanity as a whole would be better.
That’s just my field. I can think of quite a few areas that are just harmful and exists mostly to make rich richer.
Putting skills in the right place does help. Your postdoc in agricultural sustainability will help all the “unskilled” agricultural labourers. Without you, they produce less in the long run. But without them, you get nothing at all.
That’s no accident. A job is considered “unskilled” (or “unspecialized” as I like to call it) if any adult who’s gone through the education system and is reasonably healthy can do. Since society would collapse without these jobs, we want to do everything we can to make sure we always have people who can do them. How do you make that happen? By designing the education system to teach everyone the skills to do them and making it mandatory to complete your schooling. As a result, nearly everyone is capable of doing some of the most important jobs for our society.
It’s wild that no one can look up how unskilled labor is actually defined.
Unskilled labor is kind of a misnomer. Perhaps the word should change to match what it is trying to say.
Or perhaps people should not expect that every turn of phrase is a colloquialism?
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. But there is a difference between labor used to develop and labor used to perform.
Billionaires don’t actually work. The higher up the work chain the more you get paid, and the less you do.
Damn. We should all quit our jobs and become billionaires!
That’s the dream they force onto us, go up in the ladder to work less, but then you have to crush the ones below you on your way up otherwise it does not work
The oldest jobs, which are the most important, are in some sense paid what they were when the job was created, so mothers are paid nothing, while farm workers, cooks, homemakers are paid next to nothing.
Traditionally, mothers are ‘paid’ in the sense that they receive the fruits of the family’s labour. So, if Daddy back in 2032 BC worked his arse off to get an iPhone, Mummy gets to play on it too. Or food or something idk
How quickly we threw those COVID hero’s to the trash
Hero’s what?
Their to-the-trash, obviously! Can’t you read? Though I’ll admit I don’t know what a to the trash is.
in general we threw them in the trash as a parcel with calling them heroes. we gave them recognition of their value in lieu of due compensation
“You’re so great! Please keep working while I reap the rewards and sit on my ever-growing pile of money.”
People take offense to the “unskilled” part, and it’s just a stupid nitpick. Unskilled doesn’t mean that it’s an unimportant doofus jobs, it means it’s a job that almost anyone can do. That doesn’t make it unimportant.
Everyone can help haul stuff at a construction site. Everyone can collect garbage bags around the city. Everyone can deliver mail and packages. These jobs require no special education, you can literally get hired and start tomorrow without any training. But that does not make the job unimportant.
This post just feels like the person looks for another wording to be mad about.
I feel like this is falling down the same trap though. Ex. Someone who’s picked strawberries for 5 years is going to be FAST.
They are effectively a skilled laborer even though the job itself is “unskilled”. Yes anyone “can” do it but there are those who have effectively been doing it for years who are great at it and are skilled at it.
it means it’s a job that almost anyone can do
Not exactly. Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs that do not require a formal certification. There are many economically unskilled jobs that require a high amount of expertise. One such example is often a chef (specifically, the ones which don’t have formal culinary education).
Chefs need to have a deep understanding of food preparation techniques, flavor profiles, food safety, menu planning, and the ability to work quickly and efficiently in a high-pressure environment. It is a demanding job that few people can do. Yet, according to economics, these people would be unskilled.
Personally, I believe that people shouldn’t nitpick the percieved inaccuracy of jargon based upon the usage of words in common parlance.
I would not consider chef as “unskilled labor”
It’s not. Not even “economically”.
There’s nothing special required to open a restaurant in Sweden, which I think most would agree is a developed country. You need a business license and a food license (unsure how to translate), neither of which requires an education or training, and you need a proper location for preparing and serving food. Employees can be literally anyone off the street. You have to pass health inspections, but the inspectors don’t care much about details if nothing dangerous is going on.
I personally appreciate your example of chef and had to delete the rest of what I had to say because it got way too emotional. It’s a frustrating situation when you’re making people happy by providing a service and still not being rewarded because capitalism.
A chef is a skilled job. Because you need skill.
Flipping frozen burger patties is an unskilled job. Because you don’t need any skill.
There are a number of skills that go into working fast food, and your dismissal of them is part of the problem.
This isn’t true. Watch some POV videos of people working fast food jobs. No one is saying that McDonald’s and vascular surgery require the same amount of skill and training, but that’s not the point. We need to recognize that what’s considered menial is quite complex. Look at how long it’s taking to replace people doing basic jobs with machines.
That’s a junk ending. You try to replace anything with a machine. It’s nontrivial. But then, to come full circle, it’s a skilled labor job ;).
A chef is not skilled according to economics. However, “skill” as used in common literature and speech, still applies to these uncertified chefs.
By this uncommon and misinterpreted definition a master sword maker would also be unskilled. Which is not how common literature, speech, nor economics applies it.
While I agree with your point, Chef is definitely a skilled labour job. Literally need qualifications in food safety, if you don’t in whatever country you’re from that is more horrifying than it not being classed as skilled tbh.
From the country I’m from, you can open your own small restaurant without any qualifications.
Yes, I’m afraid to dine out when I return there during vacations.
Usually people use the term “unskilled labor” as justification that those working said jobs don’t have any skills and therefore shouldn’t earn a living wage.
The anger isn’t in the denotation of the term, but the connotation.
It’s usually a lower wage because of supply and demand but yeah any wage should be a living wage skilled or not.
Yeah you have to remember to look at it through the conservative lens where humanity is inherently hierarchical and social darwinism means the lesser tiers of society do not deserve your attention.
I feel like that’s actually pretty logical. “Skilled labor” involves skills that not everyone must have. The things that (nearly) everyone needs to be at least okay at are the things that come up in people’s lives most frequently (things like basic cleaning, socializing, and administrative/organization tasks). Without people to do the things that come up most often, society is going to fall apart.
I’m split on the name though. I understand what it means and don’t take offense (I currently work at a bakery, but I’ve also been a waitress and worked in a call center, all unskilled jobs- I’ve also worked in litigation management for an insurance company and I currently teach German classes too, which are skilled jobs, fwiw), but I get how it rubs some people the wrong way.
SPRICH
Anyone that calls any labor ‘unskilled’ is gonna get a black eye. It’s insulting and it only comes up when looking for excuses why people are underpaid.
For a brief moment in 2020, they temporarily relabeled them as “essential workers”.
It just really meant they didn’t matter, and they were the fodder for the virus.
It meant their work is important enough to risk their lives for. “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
It’s only really a measure of how easy you are to replace.
Unskilled labour refers to those in the precarious and more easily replaced position of workers. It is used by labour advocates to identify those with a greater need for union representation.
It isn’t an insult. And the never-ending euphemism treadmill only serves to divide generations and make a handful of people feel important.
This knee-jerk reaction to the term “unskilled labour” reminds me of the one that replaced the term “ebonics” with “AAVE”, implying that the black men that came up with the term were offensive.
As I recall, it was renamed due to the conservative controversy created around Ebonics in education, specifically for testing materials, and AAVE was chosen to specifically link to the impact slavery had in the USA in the creation of it, addressing both the need to “market” the idea a different way to avoid the backlash caused by conservatives and provide a more accurate and impactful definition.
I believe the only ones who ever claimed it was derogatory were the ones fighting against its accepted use in formal testing.
But that’s just what I remember.
