this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Lower vs middle class maybe sure, there is discussion there. Skilled vs unskilled labor: you don't know how to read even Wikipedia. It has nothing to do with skill (you can watch a guy dice an onion in his hand in 4.2 seconds and it's still "unskilled labor") and everything to do with choosing the right vocabulary to express a point: some jobs require college or trade school and some do not.
All skilled labor is compressed unskilled labor, or in other words, all unskilled labor is skilled labor.
Training and raising someone to do a job contributes to the value produced by their labor, it matters more in comparison to the aggregate whole than anything else.
I don't know how to respond to this? I mean yes you are right but the compression is not situation agnostic which is the whole point: some jobs ("skilled labor") require a particular degree or pretraining as a point of entry, and others ("unskilled labor") do not. It doesn't mean it's not valuable or not worth pursuing, but it's a mincing of words that are poorly chosen in the first place.
At the end of the day yes both varieties are worth pursuing and are necessary but one has a zero knowledge entry point and the other does not. I don't agree with "skilled vs unskilled" as vocab goes, but this is the point.
My point is that the idea of "unskilled labor" is false, if skilled labor is labor that requires training, then all labor is skilled labor of a different manner, and as such all labor is labor, even if some labor is more or less constrained.
2x vs 3x doesn't mean x changes.
It seems to me the point you are making is that you take issue with the choice of wording ("unskilled") and I do too. That doesn't mean it doesn't represent a real category. It's school vs no school so use that word if you want. If tomorrow I want to apprentice as a plumber I can, if tomorrow you want to be a researcher in artificial intelligence you can't. You can pick the wording but that's a real distinction: a job board in your town will hire a line cook with no experience, or an apprentice tradesman with no experience, but that is not true for every single profession. They all take skill in the long run, some have a barrier to entry and THAT is what the words (which are badly chosen admittedly) are for.
"No school" still requires raising someone, negating it because it's shared doesn't mean the labor didn't require a large input beforehand to be done.
A line chef isn't considered an unskilled laborer. Unskilled labor is like flipping burgers, digging ditches, and that sort of thing.
Unskilled labor is a bullshit term used to diminish the work done by people in low paying jobs. Many people would say that a line cook is unskilled, slightly above flipping burgers or digging ditches. It's nebulous and useless for productive conversation
No you've missed the point. It has nothing at all to do with value or pay scale as you can easily see by comparing a B.S. grad in engineering with a trained plumber who will definitely make more money. All "unskilled" means is that you didn't go to school to start. Period. It doesn't mean it's not valuable or doesn't require skill, it means whoever started the discussion picked shitty words.
There are definitely jobs that don't really require any specific skills. If you can learn all of your duties after 1 minute of instructions, what would you call that? It doesn't need to be interpreted as a derogatory term, but it's accurate for a lot of positions.
No youre conflating how you define the word "skill" with the actual definition. It's absolutely unfortunate but just means you didn't go to school to get the job.
There are plenty of jobs that don't require a college degree but require a lot of skills. Would you consider an electrician to be unskilled labor? I don't know anyone who would. But if you can perform all the duties of your job after some simple instructions then that's usually considered unskilled labor.
Yes I would because that's how the terms are defined. It doesn't mean it doesn't require skill, it just means that's how some nitwit decided to divide the categories.
Edit: to be exceptionally clear, these categories have NOTHING to do with how you define the word "skill". I didn't pick the words, but you can't force it to fit a definition of skill because this is the accepted meaning. Sorry.
Defined by whom? Merriam-Webster lists the definition I was using as the official definition.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unskilled%20labor
I may have responded to you without reading carefully enough. It seems we are in fact making the same point on the reread.
Do you mean to say line cook? Because it goes without saying that a chef is a skilled labourer but a cook also has to chop onions fast.