Ever seen someone doing their “unskilled job” all their life? It’s just fucking magic!
The truth is that capitalists hate skilled workers, because those workers have bargaining power. This is why they love the sort of automation which completely removes workers or thought from the equation, even if the ultimate solution is multiple times more expensive or less competent than before.
Nothing is more infuriating to a boss, than a worker that can talk back with experience.
From my experience in both the workforce and reading the news, I feel like CEO is a strong candidate for “unskilled job”. I mean, when someone can simultaneously be the CEO for a major car company, a major rocket company, a brain implant company, and an infrastructure company, and be the owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of a major social media company, while still having time to spend all day xitting out their unhinged thoughts to the world, CEO has to be the easiest job in all of humanity.
Add ‘landlord’ to the list of unskilled jobs
- cops
It’s not easy. You have to be completely dead inside and ready to fire all your coworkers at a moment’s notice!
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I don’t think the issue is describing the gap, rather that “unskilled labor” has long been used with the implication that, since it doesn’t require extensive training or education to perform at a satisfactory level, the people doing this work are unworthy of receiving decent working conditions or compensation.
There’s also a tendency to negate the contribution of so-called unskilled workers to enabling more prestigious professions to exist. That a surgeon could learn how to do the janitor’s job to a satisfactory level doesn’t change the fact that without agricultural laborers breaking their backs to grow the food they eat, construction workers paving roads or laying out transportation infrastructure they use to get around, or the janitor keeping the hospital from becoming a filthy health hazard, the surgeon could not do their jobs. This atomized view of labor ignores the reality of interdependence between countless jobs to allow society to continue functioning as it does, obfuscating the indispensability of low prestige jobs in order to allow other individuals the time and resources needed to be able to train for and perform higher prestige jobs without having to spend an inordinate amount of their time attending to more fundamental needs like food and shelter.
In no society do you see surgeons, computer programmers, or engineers emerge and begin carrying out their functions without a far greater number of people first doing the heavy lifting of performing these less prestigious jobs. They are fundamental to our society, yet the label unskilled labor is used to minimize this so that people are more liable to tolerate the abuse and degrading conditions those who work these jobs are subjected to.
Sure but the problem isn’t the name “unskilled worker”, if we renamed the category the people in it would still be easy to replace and so have low wages because training a new person in the job is still going to be cheap and easy
Why would we need a specific word to describe that gap in the first place? A surgeon is a job, so does a fast food worker. Sure one skill is more rare than the other, but why is it more rare in the first place? Why can’t anyone study to become a qualified surgeon? Why can’t anyone study to do whatever it is they wanted to do?
See how you didn’t ask “why can’t anyone flip burgers?”. Or “why can’t anyone study to become a sandwich maker at subway?”. You inherently know that anyone with a week of training can do it.
Alright, fair point
Why can’t anyone study to become a qualified surgeon?
anyone can try
I don’t think it’s anyone. The difference is that one job training requires extensive facility and infrastructure in place to do the training, while the other is trivial. You can train a lot of people to flip burgers with a lot less resources than training a surgeon to do surgery.
Why can’t anyone study to become a qualified surgeon? Why can’t anyone study to do whatever it is they wanted to do?
What exactly is your point here? That medicine degrees are inaccessible? (Sounds like an America problem.) Or that requiring a medicine degree is a capitalist conspiracy because surgery can be learnt on the job?
Why would we need a specific word to describe that gap in the first place?
In principle, anyone who wants to can study to be a surgeon. It’s just that most of them will fail, be it at the first hurdle of qualifying for a medicine degree course, the next hurdle of actually passing the course, or any of the subsequent hurdles in training. By contrast, pretty much any able-bodied person who sets out to learn how to flip burgers will have succeeded, by and large, within a few days.
I think I mixed my opinion because of my other comments. I just realized that when reading which comment thread I am replying to (about “some job requires more skill”)
My point is that I don’t think we need a word to describe the difference “level” of skill since I believe there is no “level” of skill but a different skill is just that. Different skill. Being good and passing the hurdle to be able to do surgery doesn’t translate to being good at flipping burgers. Alright, some skills require more hurdles than others to be acquired but it doesn’t mean one skill is “better” than the other. More rare or more “valuable” sure, but not in the sense of hierarchy. I.e, flipping burgers is a “lower” skill than surgery.
Some jobs require more skill, and some workers are more skilled. You can’t get around that fact. That doesn’t mean anyone should be making poverty wages. I think it’s fair though that workers are paid more for learning skills. That can be either though paying them more at work, or paying them while they are in education. Note I don’t just mean free education, I mean actually giving them money to study. That’s the only way to make paying skilled and unskilled workers the same a fair system.
I disagree. A skill is a skill. Some are more skilled than others IN THE SAME SKILL. You cannot objectively compare a different skill with another. If a skill required to do surgery is “more” than flipping a burger, then being good at surgery means you are magically good at flipping burgers, but that is not the case.
It’s “more” in the sense that I learned how to flip burgers in a day. Can’t say I can learn to do surgery in a day.
Then I suggest using the word more valuable skill than being more skilled. More valuable skill since it implies rarity and not some sort of hierarchy. That’s my take anyways from the word “some jobs require more skill”.
Now you’re just being pedantic.
Well, yeah. I guess it is because I am often jumping fields because otherwise it can get confusing when switching context (I am a mechatronics engineer, so a blend of mechanical, electrical, control system, and programming)
What does that have to do with being pedantic?
Habit from work
I think the big part of it is the required time it takes to be considered competent. Like for arguments sake lets throw out cost of education. The amount of time and effort it takes to be considered a competent surgan is hundreds of times longer than training a competent burger flipper.
Even with grilling there is different skill levels. A professional chef/smoker takes a long time to hone their art.
I think everyone should be paid a living wage, but when people throw trained professionals that require years of experience in with cashiers or fast food cooks it really subtracts from their argument.
We should be trying to elevate all jobs to a living wage while recognizing some jobs are just harder. Otherwise no one will listen.
Some skills take longer to acquire. Much longer. Some require certain aptitudes. As you say you can be more skilled than another worker at the same job, because you have more experience, training, aptitude, or you just care more. How is paying them all the same in any way fair?
Oh yes and some people have a greater number of skills than others. How is that not being more skilled than another?
I am not saying we should pay them the same?
So you were just being pedantic then?
Yes, sorry
Exactly. Every job has it’s own skills, whether that be mental, physical, or both.
There’s not a single job on Earth that you could plop someone into with no practuce and have them instantly be good at it - if someone tells you otherwise they’re either incompetent or they’re lying (like stated in the above meme)Yes. Society needs to show more appreciation for every worker.
“Burger flippers wanting more than a insert other job here, ridiculous” crowd when everybody else’s wages also go up
What about the, “job” of rich kid celebrity that just exists to be chased by media and brands all day? I feel like you could put anyone in that position with zero training and they’d be fine.
While I’m not in the business of defending rich folks, but there is a reason a lot of child celebrities tend to go off the deep end - having never being certain of your privacy is probably maddening.
If you can learn your job well enough after a week or so to do it satisfactorily, it’s an unskilled job.
There are definitely unskilled jobs. When I was a cart attendant at Target, I was in an unskilled job. If someone with less than two weeks training were left to do one of the jobs I have now, people would literally die.
So like a CEO?
Implying CEOs learn anything
The urgency or criticality of the job is not what makes it unskilled.
One can argue that an unskilled supermarket employee can cause economic hardship, or even death (think food poisoning).
There’s no such thing as an unskilled job.They all require training and in all of them you become better as you learn more about that skill. How you learn that skill, in practice or in theory is irrelevant.
Likewise, the fact that some businesses are OK to eat economic losses in bad workers and turnover in order to keep the worker dis-empowered does not make the job “unskilled”
I agree that all jobs need some training, but I think the termology is the real enemy. Like yes a cashier needs training but is it comparable to what is considered “skilled labor/trades” like qualified electriction, plumbers, welders, engineers, etc?
I think everyone should make a living wage and think the terminology is definitely used to oppress and divide but whenever I see these arguments it really feels like people don’t see a distinction between the amout of work/time it takes to be competent in these jobs.
Yes, it’s absolutely comparable at the same years of experience in that role. Like every other job.
Thoughts on “[significantly] less skilled“?:
It’s bullshit. How many people can replace the CEOs who routinely drive companies to the ground? Millions. Why were programmers badly paid when they were women-dominated but well paid when it was men?
Not a lot can easily “replace” the fast food worker who’s been flipping burgers for 20 years.
This is is just apologia.
It doesn’t matter if you think CEO’s can be replaced easily. It matters what company boards think and it isn’t many people. Also who they are willing to replace. Most of the board members probably have a close relationship with the ceo. Not so the burger flipper.
Feel like I might take the job on the right
Bad CEOs sure suck. It’s so important to have a good leader at the top, nonprofits will pay millions given competing private sector demand.
We wouldn’t assume driving companies into the ground isn’t always accidental, would we? Feature, not a bug, if it’s someone’s job to strip mine a company until it’s a shell. :) Of course you also have e.g. Lehman Brothers CEO denying his firm was even in trouble, or Enron’s mismanagement and the subsequent 99% loss in value.
I had to look into the early days of programming. Sounds like it was viewed as an extension of clerical work and therefore tedious. Computational demands increased, salaries increased, increased salaries brought more men into the field.
I do imagine the best 20yr burger flipper is at least X% more efficient than the best 1yr burger flipper… but X is probably not above like what, 20%? In the executive world, I’d guess the ratio is far different.
Mannn, would this all be moot if we just had Universal Basic Income? Or nearly moot. Inequality would still abound, but it’s much more acceptable if the least amongst us are comfortable and can be happy.
Skilled labor is just compressed unskilled labor, at the end of the day labor is labor.
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And I made a career in IT from googling shit and remember the steps. Dont see the difference…
Unskilled jobs? You mean CEOs and politicians?
Only skill required for that is lying with a smile
First off, I’d argue that there are vanishingly few truly unskilled jobs - merely that the entry barrier to them are so low that most fully able adults can pick them up in a short amount of time.
I ran into this exact topic roughly half a year ago - so here’s a somewhat rewritten version of what I wrote up, specifically about the skills of company executives - a group which CEOs are a part of.
So, executives. There is no ‘exact’ skill set specific to executives, as there are many types. There are however skills and traits that many have in common that are useful.
I’ll split them into three vague groups.- “politicians”, managers and industry experts.
The first category are social power players more than anything getting into their position due to connections and charisma. Their importance is playing the loyalties of other people - widely considered the most useless execs, even in business circles. If they’d be categorized by “skillset”, it’d be people skills (leadership) and connections to important people.
Managerial executives are usually focused on economy (i.e resource management) and the running of an organization. They’ll often have both experience and academic knowledge of organizational structures, asset management and economics, helping their organization (at least on paper) make the most of their resources. They can be good at their job, but if they get too focused on the “on paper” economics they fall into the category of “greedy, money grabbing fucks who ruin everything they touch”.
The last and (in my mind) best category are the industry experts. Often they’ll have come from within a company or organization and have in-depth knowledge of how things work and what is “important” in a business. These sorts are the “boring” ones we don’t hear much about, often having started their a business and grown it, or climbed the ranks from within and sat in leadership for decades. On the flip side they’ll have opinions without any obvious basis, “This is just how it is done”, which is in many cases important, but in others pure BS.
In all three categories you’ll find execs who are good and bad in different ways and also offend your sensibilities in different ways.
First, I don’t think “unskilled jobs” is used correctly most of the time and agree with you 99%. My quibble is that people often say “unskilled jobs” to mean “jobs that can be learned to do adequately without prior experience.” Some, not most, of the jobs you show fit that category. I wish we had a corrolary to this meme to express the benefit employers get from employees who become skilled at these roles. Purely economically, if I am a manager who can hire someone who has gained great experience and can hit the job running day 1 at an “unskilled” job instead of having to train and performance manage a truly “unskilled” candidate, it would easily justify a 50-100% pay increase as it reduces the cost of management by more than that.
Thank you for making feel I matter when I was stuck in a “unskilled job”
You do. The most infuriating thing is that there’s people out there who would love to do some of these “unskilled jobs” and are very very good at it. But nobody does it out of choice when they would have to endure massive exploitation, not to mention humiliation.
In an ideal world I’d love to work some of those instead of a desk job.
Its probably an unpopular opinion considering the comments here, but I think it should be said that maybe it comes easy for alot of people, but being a cook at a fast food joint like Dairy Queen or Culver’s absolutely takes a certain amount of skill. Skill not every person has, or can learn.
When a place is busy, takes a certain process of thought patterns and organization to keep track of all the different ingredients on the griddle, what stage they’re at while cooking, while ensuring everything is cooked in a timely manner.
Sure, many people can succeed at learning these skills, not everyone can. It is a skill, and honestly, it’s slightly upsetting to see people think it’s as easy as breathing, when it’s just not for some people. If it were actually that simple, you’d never have to check the bag to make sure they got the order right before you drive off and there wouldn’t be videos of fast food workers being mistreated for giving some jerk fries instead of onion rings. Ever.
Imo, although there is overlap, both jobs require some skills that different than the other. Typically, surgeons perform, at most, a handful of types of surgery (per surgery), on 1 or 2 people at a time. They know what surgery will be preformed ahead of time, so they can prepare, and there’s a typically a set procedure for the deviations or complications that may arise. Successfully improvising is what sets a great surgeon apart. And, if all is going well, they have teams that can stabilize the patient for an extended amount of time. Fast food workers are assembling multiple orders with multiple foods in minutes. It may take a surgeon years to learn proper surgery, but it doesn’t mean they have the skill or mindset that is required to flip burgers.
Even if the work itself is easy, dealing with customers is a skill set too. Too many of my friends couldn’t hold customer facing jobs because they just couldn’t deal with people (understandably).
I’m in that camp too. Customer facing jobs took a huge toll on my mental health that I’m still recovering from, even if I was eventually rather good at it.
It’s* probably an unpopular opinion
Ever seen someone doing their “unskilled job” all their life?
Why yes, yes I have.
We should remember who is parroting the “unskilled jobs” thing over and over. It’s always capitalists that benefit from paying these folks poverty wages like the meme states. So while the category can be called “unskilled” to differentiate from jobs that require months/years of formal (or informal) training, capitalists use it as an excuse to exploit. Both things can be true at the same time for different reasons.
I learned how to drive a forklift in a day for a stock room. Capitalists would still call it an “unskilled” job because I didn’t put myself into massive debt with a student loan, spending time I don’t have in a classroom. When does that job suddenly become “skilled”? Is there some imaginary threshold capitalists will accept?
Anyone that is contributing to the pool of labor is using a skill of some sort. Whether you think your job is easier than another or not doesn’t matter. All of the voids are filled with people willing to do a skill. CEOs and landlords, on the other hand, are contributing nothing to the labor pool. Simply owning a thing is not skilled work, but they will tell you otherwise, just like they set the standards for what is “skilled” vs “unskilled.” It’s all skewed to benefit the ruling class and give them an excuse to not pay a living wage.
For context, I’m a programmer that has been in the field for 18 years. Until the working class undoes this conditioning and equally supports each other, nothing will change for the better.
There are also so many “skills/abilities” that aren’t something you learn in school.
I’ve found through my experience that I tend to be a more “valuable” employee because not only do I actually give a shit about what I do, but I also care to ask questions and actually learn about my position and how other positions play into my role. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, it’s just something I’ve noticed very very very few people I’ve worked with do as well.
That’s not something I’ll ever get paid more for because it’s not written on a stupid piece of paper certified by some expensive university, but it’s 100% beneficial to the company.
Yeah, exactly. There are tons of people out there that have amazing soft skills and curiosity they don’t get paid anything extra to put forward. Now we have this stupid phrase “quiet quitting” for people that are doing exactly what they are paid to do, while contributing nothing over and above. Capitalists will constantly demand the “over and above” in things like annual reviews etc, but they rarely compensate to match it. It’s a system where one side holds all of the leverage.
I disagree that CEOs are equivalent to landlords. CEOs do create value by providing direction for the efficient application of resources to solve business problems and leadership and direction to employees. It’s not an easy job, by any stretch.
That said, taking skill doesn’t mean that CEOs should be entitled to massive take-home pay. I think the “fix” comes in adjusting our taxation system, not CEO compensation. Well, at least so long as we’re tied to the profit-seeking corporation structure we’re in. A “good” CEO can lead a company to producing significantly more value than a bad CEO, so let them fight for big compensation packages all they want.
The highest marginal tax rate in the US for individuals peaked at 92% in the early 50s. If we had sane marginal income tax rates at higher income levels, then there would be no problem with executive income. (Granted, we also need to fix taxation on other forms of compensation and capital gains, too.)
I would disagree. We all need a living wage even for doing the most unskilled labor. Picking up dog poop or shoveling cow poop from one truck to another. There are jobs that require skills,
But everyone deserves a living wage absolutely.
The problem is capitalism, not the fact that our society has unskilled labor jobs
Yeah, a jobs a job, it should pay a living wage at a minimum. I guess the difference is supply and demand. Anyone can stock shelves at a supermarket, making the employee pool large, meaning they can lower the wage and still get someone desperate.
The government needs to step in and force companies to make that “lower wage” at least liveable.
Although to be honest that may speed up the implementation of robot shelf stockers, which creates another set of problems.
If certain jobs aren’t valuable enough to pay a living wage, then maybe they should be done by robots instead of humans.
The problem is there is a race to the bottom.
E.g. in my field of work, there is a limited supply of skilled workers. If a company won’t pay my rates, I work for one that will, and the first is left short staffed. This creates a back pressure that helps keep wages reasonable.
In “unskilled” jobs. The pool is far larger. Even if a job is worth a living wage, there is the risk of being undercut. 3/4 of a living wage is still better than nothing. This leads to a race to the bottom, that larger companies exploit ruthlessly.
There are 2 viable solutions. You either manage a minimum (a “minimum wage”) , or you decouple survival from working by providing a baseline income (“universal basic income”). The first is simpler, but distorts the market in unhelpful ways. The second is harder, but let’s market forces actually work properly, and push wages up, where appropriate.
Yeah, the way we do this in Sweden is pretty decent. There’s no minimum wage, but if you are unemployed you (A) have access to unemployment for a few months via your unions income insurance, and (B) if unemployed for a long time & do not have the means to otherwise support yourself will qualify for a basic subsistence support from your municipality along with housing benefits - on the condition that you keep looking for a job (if you aren’t disabled).
Agreed, but I don’t think the world’s ready for that. We’ll probably let masses of people starve to death/resort to crime before we start paying people a UBI or an alternate arrangement that allows people to feed themselves when they are unable to find work.
Only “talking back if experienced” is the reason for poverty wages. If they are willing to let us starve for profit, why can’t we burn down their homes for bargaining power? Why let them put their value on us in the first place and accept what we are given?
Some stuff you learn in a day some stuff you learn in a series of days…
god damn right
