this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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.