Ever seen someone doing their “unskilled job” all their life? It’s just fucking magic!
The truth is that capitalists hate skilled workers, because those workers have bargaining power. This is why they love the sort of automation which completely removes workers or thought from the equation, even if the ultimate solution is multiple times more expensive or less competent than before.
Nothing is more infuriating to a boss, than a worker that can talk back with experience.
Only “talking back if experienced” is the reason for poverty wages. If they are willing to let us starve for profit, why can’t we burn down their homes for bargaining power? Why let them put their value on us in the first place and accept what we are given?
There’s jobs you can fake your way through in a week and there’s jobs that take six years to not kill people.
The cliche example is fast food because you really can do it badly on day one. Literacy is optional. English is negotiable. That’s unavoidably distinct from jobs that require higher math or high voltage. The fact a surgeon would do worse at flipping burgers than anyone who’s worked retail does not change how people skills and sticktoitiveness are no substitute for recognizing a tumor by sight.
We will always need a way to describe that gap. You’re welcome to suggest alternatives.
I don’t think the issue is describing the gap, rather that “unskilled labor” has long been used with the implication that, since it doesn’t require extensive training or education to perform at a satisfactory level, the people doing this work are unworthy of receiving decent working conditions or compensation.
There’s also a tendency to negate the contribution of so-called unskilled workers to enabling more prestigious professions to exist. That a surgeon could learn how to do the janitor’s job to a satisfactory level doesn’t change the fact that without agricultural laborers breaking their backs to grow the food they eat, construction workers paving roads or laying out transportation infrastructure they use to get around, or the janitor keeping the hospital from becoming a filthy health hazard, the surgeon could not do their jobs. This atomized view of labor ignores the reality of interdependence between countless jobs to allow society to continue functioning as it does, obfuscating the indispensability of low prestige jobs in order to allow other individuals the time and resources needed to be able to train for and perform higher prestige jobs without having to spend an inordinate amount of their time attending to more fundamental needs like food and shelter.
In no society do you see surgeons, computer programmers, or engineers emerge and begin carrying out their functions without a far greater number of people first doing the heavy lifting of performing these less prestigious jobs. They are fundamental to our society, yet the label unskilled labor is used to minimize this so that people are more liable to tolerate the abuse and degrading conditions those who work these jobs are subjected to.
Skilled labor is just compressed unskilled labor, the training is just more unskilled labor unfolded over the expected working life of a worker.
Labor is labor.
No you don’t understand. Fancy universities and colleges are superior to practical experience. The difference is…umm…you have to pay a lot of money to go there, so only the right people can do so, which just proves that they deserve the high paying jobs.
It isn’t superior, but it takes on a different character. Labor is worth itself as an average of the totality of labor.
Training is unproductive labor that is applied over the expected working lifetime. Practical experience is a form of training, yes, but this is earned over an average as well.
Does that make sense? That’s why a seasoned electrician earns more than a journeyman, despite both having training.
Both are true. Some educations create skillful workers, just like anyone practicing a trade over time acquires skills with regards to their tasks. That being said, many degrees are just manufacturing diplomas for middle class and bourgeoisie kids who want to feel superior (and have an excuse to be rewarded as if they were).
