It’s a distinction between “on-the-job training will suffice” and “no chance without years of prep.”
No shit anything worth paying a human for involves human skills. But some jobs are open to just about anyone who can put up with it, and some jobs kill people when you try to muscle through on sticktoitiveness. A fast food restaurant can bring some rando up-to-speed in a couple weeks. An ER cannot. The distinction is necessary.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
Absolutely. I’m SUPER pro-worker, pro-union, etc., but unskilled labor isn’t a myth. There are some jobs that can be done with essentially no training or skills at all. These jobs should pay a living wage, because all jobs should. But that doesn’t change the fact that some jobs require little-to-no skill. I think that repeating this false claim actually HURTS the movement for fair wages, because it’s not a supportable argument.
I feel that the distinction is made wrong. All these labors shown may not require much of a formal education towards the job, but they all require skill that will be refined significantly over time.
Somebody who works as a harvester for years is much faster at picking crops and much more efficient at seeing which are ready to harvest and which arent.
Anybody who has kids knows that it takes years to traing them, how a properly cleaned house looks like.
Cashiers who are familiar with the workings of the companys systems, who know the numbers of bread, produce and other non-barcoded goods by heart are much faster and have less situations requiring looking something up. This in particular are skills that simply require on the job time and experience. The same issue exists for engineering project managers who cannot learn all the PCA codes of their company in the first week.
Everyone knows the difference between bar-staff that knows how to properly draw a beer and those who don’t.
Fast food workers need to perform consistently in a high stress environment, and keeping taps on the fries, the burgers, three customers orders and dealing with the half-broken coffe machine is a skill many CEOs would lack. Same goes for waiters in restaurants
Being a good brick-layer takes years of practice. A well built brick wall with consistent gaps and a smooth surface is difficult to achieve, and both aesthetically and structurally important.
…
Finally many of these jobs also require social skills and provide socialisation as part of the experience. My favorite barkeeper manages not only to get everyone their drinks in a packed bar, but also chat with the regulars and newcomers while at it. People could just order take-away instead of going to a restaurant. But having a nice restaurant atmosphere is part of the experience and the result of good waiters and so on.
We accept experience as a relevant salary and position argument for “high skilled”, which should be called “high educated” labor. It is equally relevant in supposedly “low skilled” or “unskilled” labor.
Getting better at something you picked up in a month is not the same as needing years of training to even begin.
Experience is the opposite of the problem. The concept distinguishes jobs where people are fundamentally incapable of performing the task to bare-minimum standards, until they’ve been thoroughly educated, tested, and prepared. A doctor doing their first surgery has zero prior experience. It’s their first. But they are already an expert, in some capacity, thanks to abundant theory and practice.
Again: no kidding all jobs take skill. No kidding you can get better at things. But an experienced bartender does not make tending bar “skilled labor” so long as any line cook could be pressganged into it while that guy takes a dump.
But an experienced bartender does not make tending bar “skilled labor” so long as any line cook could be pressganged into it while that guy takes a dump.
And then he messes up the CO2 and the bar cannot serve for ten minutes, losing them plenty of money.
More importantly though, the concepts are not just distinguished like that. For the “skilled” labor, it is normal and expected, that experience is paid. People whose job description reads “senior” often make 30-50% more than what people who are considered "junior"s make, even though the education is the same. But this is not done in this way for the supposed “unskilled” labor, even though the productivity and hence the value of the labor to the employer does increase just as equally with experience on the job.
Finally, i work as an engineer. Quite frankly most of what the people in a typical corporate setting do, could be done with on the job training perfectly fine. The positions were specific knowledge is required from higher education are not only limited in number, but also in scope. As a result you could also train these in maybe half a year. And if i ask older colleagues about stuff from their studying time they usually just laugh, because they’ve forgotten most of it.
Looks like you are driving a train you are not skilled for, with your derailing.
Employers pay employees money in exchange for work. That is the fundamental principle of wage labour. In a fair situation the employee’s wage reflects the value he provides to the company. This is denied to so called “unskilled” labour. You also want to deny it by overexpanding your example. Yes a doctor requires a lot of prior education. But if you think a surgeons first operation is on a live human, you are wrong. They train surgeries beforehand. Because with all the education, if the hands remained unskilled an educated doctor is still a deadly surgeon. On the flipside for a standard surgery it would be perfectly possible to train a nurse how to do it, and merely have a doctor supervise for unforseen medical aspects. And again, ask a knee surgeon after 20 years about heart diseases. Ask a cardiologist about knee surgeries. Both will have forgotten most of it.
But finally your arguement of killing people is a hyperbole. Do you know how many people die as the result of “unskilled” labor fucking up? The most deadly occupations like logging, farming, mining and construction are all requiring responsibility for protection of your own and other humans lifes, where proper experience and skill are crucial to maintain safety.
So while you talk about hypothetical unskilled doctors, the denial of skill needed in many occupations is actually killing people.
I think you didnt get the point. The act of surgery itself is akin to a skilled bricklayer. It is a craft that is improved by experience primarily and all the best grades and knowledge in the theoretical parts cannot guarantee that someone will be a good surgeon, if they lack the talent for the hands on part.
There are some jobs that can be done with essentially no training or skills at all
I disagree with the use of the word “skills”. I think any job not involving any skills at all (carrying things from A to B for example) disappeared decades or centuries ago. Every job now requires at least some skills. I certainly could never do a lot of “unskilled” jobs. I don’t have the physical attributes for some of them, and I don’t have the personal skills for others. The real issue is that while some of these jobs do require skills, they’re skills that are common enough that the people with those jobs are easily replaceable. Someone who stands up for themselves can be fired and replaced easily and the replacement will only need on-the-job training.
Also, people who work in jobs that require only on-the-job training can become extremely skilled at them. But, unfortunately, that often doesn’t lead to them making any more money. They’re much less replaceable when they gain skills at those “unskilled” jobs, but it doesn’t often lead to them knowing that they have any real power. And, often they don’t. An employer will often be willing to fire a very skilled low-wage employee if the employee speaks up for themselves, rather than risk the other low-wage employees getting any uppity ideas.
As for “poverty wages”, that’s not really related to capitalism or to labeling something “unskilled”. It’s just power dynamics.
Peasants had “poverty wages” long before capitalism was a thing. They owed a lot of labour to whoever owned the land they worked on, and in many cases even if they were growing food, they were literally starving because they owed the food harvest to the land owner. If they didn’t deliver, they could be severely punished or even killed. But, if you were a skilled craftsman, you could escape from that trap. You may still not have had any real legal rights, but you were likely to get a pretty high wage. There’s a reason that one of the big secret societies is the Freemasons. Stone masons had power because they were not easily replaced.
Wages are about power, who had the power to demand more than just subsistence living. If you do a job that requires only on-the-job training, you’re probably pretty replaceable, so your bargaining power is limited. If your job is hard to replace, you’re better compensated.
The only power that “unskilled” workers have is that there tend to be a lot of them. If they joined unions, that union would have a lot of members so it would have some power. If they voted for political candidates that truly represented them, those candidates would have a lot of backers. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the uneducated low-skilled workers have been convinced to vote against their own interests. They vote for parties that scapegoat others, and then gut policies that would benefit low-wage, “low-skill” workers.
i have known a not-insignificant amount of people who interepret the word ‘unskilled’ very literally. there are a lot of meanings these people hide behind the word ‘unskilled’, and they don’t mean ‘on-the-job training will suffice’, nor are they anywhere near that nice.
a doctor is highly-skilled, not merely skilled. i don’t see how describing someone’s livelihood as ‘unskilled’ can be — in any way — a good faith assessment in any constructive capacity.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
people can care about more than one thing. i can care about the problematic language of economists while also believing everyone deserves to have their needs met.
You have known a not-insignificant amount of tribalist assholes. They don’t mean things when they say words. The natural shape of the universe, in their eyes, is a hierarchy where the bottom half must suffer, and they’ll make whatever mouth noises justify that foregone conclusion.
If I gave you all the time in the world to pick a better label and you chose one we both agreed was flawless then those assholes would invent some other stupid reason to make the exact same claim. That’s how they think arguments work. That’s all they think we’re doing. That’s all they think there is.
This label can’t justify poverty wages, because nothing justifies poverty wages. And if you renamed it, the people trying would keep trying. You have to recognize these assholes and stop taking their arguments seriously. They’re not arguments. They’re slogans.
If it wasn’t ‘they’re unskilled!’ it’d be ‘those jobs are for teenagers!’ or ‘but hamburgers will cost thirty dollars!’ or ‘robots will do it instead!’ and if you try engaging with any of those then you’ve already lost. These people don’t fucking care. Prove them wrong and nothing changes. You have to attack the conclusion, because that’s all they have.
i agree with everything you’ve written here. we don’t need a new term. i propose eliminating ‘unskilled labour’ from our collective vocabulary, because some people who aren’t completely far gone would stand to benefit from recognising this term as you put it: a slogan. i’m not saying i expect a huge amount of effort on this front. no campaigns, just awareness.
i don’t disagree with what you’ve written here; i’m disagreeing with your point in the GP, that:
The distinction is necessary.
it’s a concept that i believe is only useful to the managerial class (and other hierarchists). it isn’t constructive in labour organising.
The distinction is literally life and death, sometimes. I don’t call it necessary just because I think it’s neat.
The most ardent outright anarchists still need to distinguish jobs anyone can kinda do versus jobs with intense risk, impact, and/or time pressure. This is that term. You can pick a different one - but you cannot get rid of the concept, unless you want surgeons and architects who keep saying “oops.”
i also want to add that this ‘distinction’ — of who is easily replaceable — is only useful to certain classes that shouldn’t exist. it isn’t a term of what jobs can be easily replaced, it’s about what people can be easily replaced, and that’s unhelpful to the proletariat.
everywhere i’ve ever lived, ‘unskilled labour’ was used more as a slur than an economic term.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
All labor that delivers value in excess of the wage deserves a living wage.
If you’re employing someone and losing money, that’s your stupid problem.
Correct, which is why the business left over don’t pay a living wage, otherwise it’s not economically viable and they disappear. Would you rather someone be unemployed (and receive no wage) vs a crummy job at which they can work towards getting higher pay?
We cannot tolerate any job, however shite, paying less than a living wage. There’s no shortage of money. There’s no shortage of work to be done. “Businesses left over” are making record profits, right now. You can figure this out.
Every fucking time:
It’s a distinction between “on-the-job training will suffice” and “no chance without years of prep.”
No shit anything worth paying a human for involves human skills. But some jobs are open to just about anyone who can put up with it, and some jobs kill people when you try to muscle through on sticktoitiveness. A fast food restaurant can bring some rando up-to-speed in a couple weeks. An ER cannot. The distinction is necessary.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
Absolutely. I’m SUPER pro-worker, pro-union, etc., but unskilled labor isn’t a myth. There are some jobs that can be done with essentially no training or skills at all. These jobs should pay a living wage, because all jobs should. But that doesn’t change the fact that some jobs require little-to-no skill. I think that repeating this false claim actually HURTS the movement for fair wages, because it’s not a supportable argument.
I feel that the distinction is made wrong. All these labors shown may not require much of a formal education towards the job, but they all require skill that will be refined significantly over time.
Finally many of these jobs also require social skills and provide socialisation as part of the experience. My favorite barkeeper manages not only to get everyone their drinks in a packed bar, but also chat with the regulars and newcomers while at it. People could just order take-away instead of going to a restaurant. But having a nice restaurant atmosphere is part of the experience and the result of good waiters and so on.
We accept experience as a relevant salary and position argument for “high skilled”, which should be called “high educated” labor. It is equally relevant in supposedly “low skilled” or “unskilled” labor.
Getting better at something you picked up in a month is not the same as needing years of training to even begin.
Experience is the opposite of the problem. The concept distinguishes jobs where people are fundamentally incapable of performing the task to bare-minimum standards, until they’ve been thoroughly educated, tested, and prepared. A doctor doing their first surgery has zero prior experience. It’s their first. But they are already an expert, in some capacity, thanks to abundant theory and practice.
Again: no kidding all jobs take skill. No kidding you can get better at things. But an experienced bartender does not make tending bar “skilled labor” so long as any line cook could be pressganged into it while that guy takes a dump.
And then he messes up the CO2 and the bar cannot serve for ten minutes, losing them plenty of money.
More importantly though, the concepts are not just distinguished like that. For the “skilled” labor, it is normal and expected, that experience is paid. People whose job description reads “senior” often make 30-50% more than what people who are considered "junior"s make, even though the education is the same. But this is not done in this way for the supposed “unskilled” labor, even though the productivity and hence the value of the labor to the employer does increase just as equally with experience on the job.
Finally, i work as an engineer. Quite frankly most of what the people in a typical corporate setting do, could be done with on the job training perfectly fine. The positions were specific knowledge is required from higher education are not only limited in number, but also in scope. As a result you could also train these in maybe half a year. And if i ask older colleagues about stuff from their studying time they usually just laugh, because they’ve forgotten most of it.
Oh no, losing money! Surely that’s the same kind of problem as killing people.
You’re not really listening.
Looks like you are driving a train you are not skilled for, with your derailing.
Employers pay employees money in exchange for work. That is the fundamental principle of wage labour. In a fair situation the employee’s wage reflects the value he provides to the company. This is denied to so called “unskilled” labour. You also want to deny it by overexpanding your example. Yes a doctor requires a lot of prior education. But if you think a surgeons first operation is on a live human, you are wrong. They train surgeries beforehand. Because with all the education, if the hands remained unskilled an educated doctor is still a deadly surgeon. On the flipside for a standard surgery it would be perfectly possible to train a nurse how to do it, and merely have a doctor supervise for unforseen medical aspects. And again, ask a knee surgeon after 20 years about heart diseases. Ask a cardiologist about knee surgeries. Both will have forgotten most of it.
But finally your arguement of killing people is a hyperbole. Do you know how many people die as the result of “unskilled” labor fucking up? The most deadly occupations like logging, farming, mining and construction are all requiring responsibility for protection of your own and other humans lifes, where proper experience and skill are crucial to maintain safety.
So while you talk about hypothetical unskilled doctors, the denial of skill needed in many occupations is actually killing people.
Read what I fucking wrote or don’t talk to me.
I think you didnt get the point. The act of surgery itself is akin to a skilled bricklayer. It is a craft that is improved by experience primarily and all the best grades and knowledge in the theoretical parts cannot guarantee that someone will be a good surgeon, if they lack the talent for the hands on part.
I disagree with the use of the word “skills”. I think any job not involving any skills at all (carrying things from A to B for example) disappeared decades or centuries ago. Every job now requires at least some skills. I certainly could never do a lot of “unskilled” jobs. I don’t have the physical attributes for some of them, and I don’t have the personal skills for others. The real issue is that while some of these jobs do require skills, they’re skills that are common enough that the people with those jobs are easily replaceable. Someone who stands up for themselves can be fired and replaced easily and the replacement will only need on-the-job training.
Also, people who work in jobs that require only on-the-job training can become extremely skilled at them. But, unfortunately, that often doesn’t lead to them making any more money. They’re much less replaceable when they gain skills at those “unskilled” jobs, but it doesn’t often lead to them knowing that they have any real power. And, often they don’t. An employer will often be willing to fire a very skilled low-wage employee if the employee speaks up for themselves, rather than risk the other low-wage employees getting any uppity ideas.
As for “poverty wages”, that’s not really related to capitalism or to labeling something “unskilled”. It’s just power dynamics.
Peasants had “poverty wages” long before capitalism was a thing. They owed a lot of labour to whoever owned the land they worked on, and in many cases even if they were growing food, they were literally starving because they owed the food harvest to the land owner. If they didn’t deliver, they could be severely punished or even killed. But, if you were a skilled craftsman, you could escape from that trap. You may still not have had any real legal rights, but you were likely to get a pretty high wage. There’s a reason that one of the big secret societies is the Freemasons. Stone masons had power because they were not easily replaced.
Wages are about power, who had the power to demand more than just subsistence living. If you do a job that requires only on-the-job training, you’re probably pretty replaceable, so your bargaining power is limited. If your job is hard to replace, you’re better compensated.
The only power that “unskilled” workers have is that there tend to be a lot of them. If they joined unions, that union would have a lot of members so it would have some power. If they voted for political candidates that truly represented them, those candidates would have a lot of backers. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the uneducated low-skilled workers have been convinced to vote against their own interests. They vote for parties that scapegoat others, and then gut policies that would benefit low-wage, “low-skill” workers.
i have known a not-insignificant amount of people who interepret the word ‘unskilled’ very literally. there are a lot of meanings these people hide behind the word ‘unskilled’, and they don’t mean ‘on-the-job training will suffice’, nor are they anywhere near that nice.
a doctor is highly-skilled, not merely skilled. i don’t see how describing someone’s livelihood as ‘unskilled’ can be — in any way — a good faith assessment in any constructive capacity.
people can care about more than one thing. i can care about the problematic language of economists while also believing everyone deserves to have their needs met.
You have known a not-insignificant amount of tribalist assholes. They don’t mean things when they say words. The natural shape of the universe, in their eyes, is a hierarchy where the bottom half must suffer, and they’ll make whatever mouth noises justify that foregone conclusion.
If I gave you all the time in the world to pick a better label and you chose one we both agreed was flawless then those assholes would invent some other stupid reason to make the exact same claim. That’s how they think arguments work. That’s all they think we’re doing. That’s all they think there is.
This label can’t justify poverty wages, because nothing justifies poverty wages. And if you renamed it, the people trying would keep trying. You have to recognize these assholes and stop taking their arguments seriously. They’re not arguments. They’re slogans.
If it wasn’t ‘they’re unskilled!’ it’d be ‘those jobs are for teenagers!’ or ‘but hamburgers will cost thirty dollars!’ or ‘robots will do it instead!’ and if you try engaging with any of those then you’ve already lost. These people don’t fucking care. Prove them wrong and nothing changes. You have to attack the conclusion, because that’s all they have.
i agree with everything you’ve written here. we don’t need a new term. i propose eliminating ‘unskilled labour’ from our collective vocabulary, because some people who aren’t completely far gone would stand to benefit from recognising this term as you put it: a slogan. i’m not saying i expect a huge amount of effort on this front. no campaigns, just awareness.
i don’t disagree with what you’ve written here; i’m disagreeing with your point in the GP, that:
it’s a concept that i believe is only useful to the managerial class (and other hierarchists). it isn’t constructive in labour organising.
The distinction is literally life and death, sometimes. I don’t call it necessary just because I think it’s neat.
The most ardent outright anarchists still need to distinguish jobs anyone can kinda do versus jobs with intense risk, impact, and/or time pressure. This is that term. You can pick a different one - but you cannot get rid of the concept, unless you want surgeons and architects who keep saying “oops.”
i also want to add that this ‘distinction’ — of who is easily replaceable — is only useful to certain classes that shouldn’t exist. it isn’t a term of what jobs can be easily replaced, it’s about what people can be easily replaced, and that’s unhelpful to the proletariat.
everywhere i’ve ever lived, ‘unskilled labour’ was used more as a slur than an economic term.
All labor that delivers value in excess of the wage deserves a living wage.
If you’re employing someone and losing money, that’s your stupid problem.
If you’re employing someone - they deserve a living wage. Or fuck off.
Correct, which is why the business left over don’t pay a living wage, otherwise it’s not economically viable and they disappear. Would you rather someone be unemployed (and receive no wage) vs a crummy job at which they can work towards getting higher pay?
Fuck off and take your false dilemma with you.
We cannot tolerate any job, however shite, paying less than a living wage. There’s no shortage of money. There’s no shortage of work to be done. “Businesses left over” are making record profits, right now. You can figure this out.
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