Skilled or unskilled. If you do a full day's work, you should be able to support yourself and family.
We should also take care of those that are unable to do so.
No labor is unskilled it's classist bullshit to make us think we're better than each other. Farm work especially so since there are weird local tricks for local planting styles and crops.
Nicole when she is not catfishing Lemmy users.
When you start really thinking about it, often unskilled jobs are nearly all the necessary jobs for humanity to survive. No one is going to suffer if your PhD army can no longer update twitter, I'm afraid to name the percentage, but most skilled jobs are useless in the sense that they're not really making anything of value.
I think SEO jobs are good example of this.
I disagree. Without Frtiz Haber inventing nitrogen fertilizer there wouldn't even be people to do unskilled labor.
This class battle has to stop. All economic fields are productive given that the market is valuing it. What's not productive is corruption and hoarding and middle manager fiddling. We have science to determine all that so we don't even need to gut feel this out.
Someone researching "transgender mice" can low key add more value than thousands or millions of "unskilled laborers". We need to diversify and value all avenues of our collective production and growth because thats just a smart thing to do. Except for billionaires and hoarders which clearly are a net negative.
Putting skills in the right place does help. Your postdoc in agricultural sustainability will help all the "unskilled" agricultural labourers. Without you, they produce less in the long run. But without them, you get nothing at all.
That's no accident. A job is considered "unskilled" (or "unspecialized" as I like to call it) if any adult who's gone through the education system and is reasonably healthy can do. Since society would collapse without these jobs, we want to do everything we can to make sure we always have people who can do them. How do you make that happen? By designing the education system to teach everyone the skills to do them and making it mandatory to complete your schooling. As a result, nearly everyone is capable of doing some of the most important jobs for our society.
Good point. But not just from planned education, I think. Most jobs can be done with a body and mind in moderate working order - our bodies and minds are amazing things! Picking fruit does not require a school education, nor does laying bricks require a gym routine. Though laying them straight needs training, reading instructions needs literacy and reporting results needs numeracy. Education helps.
It's wild that no one can look up how unskilled labor is actually defined.
Unskilled labor is kind of a misnomer. Perhaps the word should change to match what it is trying to say.
Or perhaps people should not expect that every turn of phrase is a colloquialism?
Why not?
Only because society won't let prisons pay their prisoners 10¢ an hour to flip hamburgers at McDonald's. That's the next step to avoid collapse of the average standard of living.
People take offense to the "unskilled" part, and it's just a stupid nitpick. Unskilled doesn't mean that it's an unimportant doofus jobs, it means it's a job that almost anyone can do. That doesn't make it unimportant.
Everyone can help haul stuff at a construction site. Everyone can collect garbage bags around the city. Everyone can deliver mail and packages. These jobs require no special education, you can literally get hired and start tomorrow without any training. But that does not make the job unimportant.
This post just feels like the person looks for another wording to be mad about.
Usually people use the term "unskilled labor" as justification that those working said jobs don't have any skills and therefore shouldn't earn a living wage.
The anger isn't in the denotation of the term, but the connotation.
It's usually a lower wage because of supply and demand but yeah any wage should be a living wage skilled or not.
Yeah you have to remember to look at it through the conservative lens where humanity is inherently hierarchical and social darwinism means the lesser tiers of society do not deserve your attention.
I feel like this is falling down the same trap though. Ex. Someone who's picked strawberries for 5 years is going to be FAST.
They are effectively a skilled laborer even though the job itself is "unskilled". Yes anyone "can" do it but there are those who have effectively been doing it for years who are great at it and are skilled at it.
it means it's a job that almost anyone can do
Not exactly. Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs that do not require a formal certification. There are many economically unskilled jobs that require a high amount of expertise. One such example is often a chef (specifically, the ones which don't have formal culinary education).
Chefs need to have a deep understanding of food preparation techniques, flavor profiles, food safety, menu planning, and the ability to work quickly and efficiently in a high-pressure environment. It is a demanding job that few people can do. Yet, according to economics, these people would be unskilled.
Personally, part of me believes that people shouldn't nitpick the percieved inaccuracy of jargon based upon the usage of words in common parlance.
The other part of me wishes that the experts would have chosen a less polarizing term with more neutral connotations.
There's nothing special required to open a restaurant in Sweden, which I think most would agree is a developed country. You need a business license and a food license (unsure how to translate), neither of which requires an education or training, and you need a proper location for preparing and serving food. Employees can be literally anyone off the street. You have to pass health inspections, but the inspectors don't care much about details if nothing dangerous is going on.
I personally appreciate your example of chef and had to delete the rest of what I had to say because it got way too emotional. It's a frustrating situation when you're making people happy by providing a service and still not being rewarded because capitalism.
While I agree with your point, Chef is definitely a skilled labour job. Literally need qualifications in food safety, if you don't in whatever country you're from that is more horrifying than it not being classed as skilled tbh.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. But there is a difference between labor used to develop and labor used to perform.
How quickly we threw those COVID hero's to the trash
in general we threw them in the trash as a parcel with calling them heroes. we gave them recognition of their value in lieu of due compensation
"You're so great! Please keep working while I reap the rewards and sit on my ever-growing pile of money."
The oldest jobs, which are the most important, are in some sense paid what they were when the job was created, so mothers are paid nothing, while farm workers, cooks, homemakers are paid next to nothing.
Traditionally, mothers are 'paid' in the sense that they receive the fruits of the family's labour. So, if Daddy back in 2032 BC worked his arse off to get an iPhone, Mummy gets to play on it too. Or food or something idk
For a brief moment in 2020, they temporarily relabeled them as "essential workers".
It just really meant they didn't matter, and they were the fodder for the virus.
It meant their work is important enough to risk their lives for. "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Billionaires don’t actually work. The higher up the work chain the more you get paid, and the less you do.
Damn. We should all quit our jobs and become billionaires!
That’s the dream they force onto us, go up in the ladder to work less, but then you have to crush the ones below you on your way up otherwise it does not work
It's only really a measure of how easy you are to replace.
it's also far less unskilled than people assign credit for. all work is knowledge work
I feel like, especially here in the US, what unskilled means has changed to “any job that doesn’t require a college degree”.
We seem to have almost completely forgotten about apprenticeships and similar career paths.
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