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A job that has to be done is a job that deserves a fair pay, since a person is giving up a part of their life for it. Sure some people can have higher wages or whatever.

I dont think that is what this post tries to point out. It’s just that “skill” has become an way to justify strong inequalities, regardless of the “real” skill difference. By a sort of reversal of process.

Liberalists imagine that anyone can try to get any job or start any business. Thus if you earn less, it’s because you are not skilled enough to do something that pays more. Hence meritocratic arguments.

This rethoric has “stolen” the concept of skill to put it in this strong concept “skilled worker” / “unskilled worker”.

Yes skill difference exists between tasks (more precise than work, and less attached to a person but to an specific action). Maybe we should pay better people that spend time doing these tasks. But it is not to the “free market” to decide, but to the people, to the workers themselves what tasks get paid more or less.

Also because skill is far to be a good metric of what behaviors we should create incentives towards. Usefulness is much higher up on my list. If I am a very skilled advertising executive, is it a good reason to pay me more ?

skill is learned performance to execute a task, not at what privilege level of society you exist.

if given the same opportunities in life, most people would have the capacity (skill) to do everything in the higher end category salary base. most people just aren’t privileged to try.

so in place of an opportunity, most people need to learn other skills that don’t come with a diploma. those skills usually involve dealing with the absolute worst parts of society and smile while doing it. such as dealing with assholes on a daily basis, breaking your back/knees, working long hours, working in dangerous environments, working in scorching sun, working in toxic social climates, working in sub-zero, etc. etc. these people, the people not privileged, and forced to take this path, are not unskilled by a measure of raw skill. hell, not everyone can put up with assholes, in fact, most of the time, the level of ability to put up with assholes depend on your level of privilege. the level to put up with permanent back pain, bad knees, etc, depend on your privilege. the level of nutrition, the level of… the list goes fucking on and on.

all jobs takes skills to perform, no skill is worth more than another beyond raw performance of execution. some jobs just don’t need a text-book. what does matter, and what pay should reflect, is the damage and inconvenience it causes to you as an individual to perform said job. high-paying jobs usually are the least demanding, but usually cost the most time or money to attain - resources most people just don’t have, so most people just can’t get the “highly skilled” stamp for jobs, simply because it is beyond their class.

yes, in fact, pretty much anyone could clean up a bathroom that is quite literally covered by shit by some asshole who just want to ruin your day. so shouldn’t the question then be, where is the ceiling of payment for said job on an individual level? if given the choice, few people would accept such a task at the minimum wage they are offered - but, in every single case, it’s usually not about choice, it’s about where on the social level you exist; which allows the upper class to dictate and control exactly how much money said task is worth. likewise, pretty much anyone could sit on their ass all day and collect rent.

labour is literally the act of selling time from your life to someone else and get paid in tokens that can be exchanged for the purpose of survival (shelter/food/water). most people, indeed, sell their entire life (except for their sleeping hours), just to exist. there is no meaning to existence, but they do it anyway, because society tells them that’s how we should exist in society. that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing at their job, that they don’t have skill, it just means they did not win the birth lottery.

so no, there aren’t really that many jobs in todays format that take more skills than others, even jobs that require a diploma usually don’t prepare you for the actual job; the actual job, which goes for most jobs, you train the moment you are hired, which usually takes just a week up to a few months (and why you used to be able to climb from the postal room in classical work ethics). and usually, the higher the job is ranked in skill, the less actual skill it requires. there are exceptions, of course, but the entire system is incompatible with the way we define it today. if we went by the actual exceptions, most of the wealthy would lose their place in society and have to start cleaning shitty toilets for a living, while the rare few with brilliance or unique traits; would dominate the particular fields that the rare few, largely due to genetics, are capable of doing - and i’m not entirely convinced we should categorize genetical traits as a skill, it’s not something you learned, it’s something you were born with, much like privilege. which i believe most would argue is not, in fact, a skill. no matter what they want society to believe.