I feel like it should be called "primary" labor or something to that effect. "Skilled" labor that can't function without "unskilled" labor to support it can be called "secondary" labor.
I feel like that’s actually pretty logical. “Skilled labor” involves skills that not everyone must have. The things that (nearly) everyone needs to be at least okay at are the things that come up in people’s lives most frequently (things like basic cleaning, socializing, and administrative/organization tasks). Without people to do the things that come up most often, society is going to fall apart.
I’m split on the name though. I understand what it means and don’t take offense (I currently work at a bakery, but I’ve also been a waitress and worked in a call center, all unskilled jobs- I’ve also worked in litigation management for an insurance company and I currently teach German classes too, which are skilled jobs, fwiw), but I get how it rubs some people the wrong way.
That makes sense.
Maybe unskilled workas can call each other that, if they don't use the hard 'r'?
Okay, okay, "labour isn't as bad as slavery" and it's "inappropriate to joke about that on the internet."
But yes, maybe the term is demeaning; and maybe it doesn't need to be. I suppose in the end the point is we should value those labourers and their work, even though economically they're easier to mistreat and belittle.
Unskilled labour refers to those in the precarious and more easily replaced position of workers. It is used by labour advocates to identify those with a greater need for union representation.
It isn't an insult. And the never-ending euphemism treadmill only serves to divide generations and make a handful of people feel important.
This knee-jerk reaction to the term "unskilled labour" reminds me of the one that replaced the term "ebonics" with "AAVE", implying that the black men that came up with the term were offensive.
As I recall, it was renamed due to the conservative controversy created around Ebonics in education, specifically for testing materials, and AAVE was chosen to specifically link to the impact slavery had in the USA in the creation of it, addressing both the need to "market" the idea a different way to avoid the backlash caused by conservatives and provide a more accurate and impactful definition.
I believe the only ones who ever claimed it was derogatory were the ones fighting against its accepted use in formal testing.
But that's just what I remember.
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.
"In fact, not only does the market assessment of the value of different forms of work not correspond to popular conceptions of what they actually contribute to society, but there actually seems to be an inverse relation: with few exceptions, the principle seems to be, the more one's work is seen as socially useful, the more it is recognized as helping others, the less one is likely to be paid for it."
Anyone that calls any labor ‘unskilled’ is gonna get a black eye. It’s insulting and it only comes up when looking for excuses why people are underpaid.
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