Most “unskilled labor” is heavily skill dependant. You wouldn’t want a chef, builder or plumber who didn’t know what they were doing. And for production: machinists, mechanics and foremen make or break profit with their skills.
So what’s a better name for these jobs?
Depends on how you define “skill” I guess. If you can pick a random person of the street and it’s possbile to instruct them to do the job in less then an hour, I’d call it unskilled labour. Like picking fruits, stocking shelfs, etc.
I define skilled as you are hired to do a task.
Well, that just changes the meaning of the word “skilled” to be the same as “hired” which is a bit pointless since we already had a work for that. And now we need a new one … like “no-qualification labour”.
yes, you are hired to do a thing that requires skill. Everything requires skill, if something did not require some level of skill there would be no job.
Again, depends on your definition of skill.
I would not classify the ability to grab, lift or carry as a “skill” in terms of labour. You are hired to do work. But if basically any able-bodied person could do the work, it doesn’t require skill.