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.
Could someone tell me why it wouldnt work if we all got the same pay ? Like we are equally important to each other, non of us could survive without that someone else did something different than what you do for a living.
Wouldnt it be more sustainable if people choose an occupation out of passion than whats most profitable ? There wouldnt be any labour shortages.
You could just open an LLC that researches if having lunch everyday kills you and each day report, “Not yet.” For this to work you’d have to prove the value of anything you’d want to do for work to the government and what happens if the government is bad at knowing what has potential. You know, hypothetically.
There’s a popular myth that, without the motivation of money, nothing would ever get done.
Im in IT just for the cash and being able to work from home, the older I get I understand how much I hate it and is totally unmotivated and do a shitty job. Id rather do something semi-physically work in mechanics or machining that gets more appreciated. But I stay and lurk along…
Why beat around the bush. Just remove the concept of money altogether
I get what you mean but I cant really see how that would work. There must be some kind of score keeping.
This is a bridge too far for most people, but you could have an equal society just by setting a limit to salary differential. If the highest salary was capped at 5 times the lowest, that would be fine. The largest socialist organizations in the world (militaries) have this kind of system.
The only, “job” that comes to mind, that doesn’t require skill is pornography, in general sex work.
You must be out of your mind if you think that
Well it was the only thing that came to mind as an obvious one. I’m sure there’s other jobs out there that don’t require skills… but a freaking clown making animal shaped balloons has more skills than a sex worker.
Unskilled jobs? You mean CEOs and politicians?
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.
Only skill required for that is lying with a smile
Out of interest, what do you all think a ceo does?
Make up excuses, ruin other people’s work, take credit for that same work when it survives their meddling, bang hookers and hit ketamine all day, and lie constantly.
And be narcissistic
though some of your points encompass that
Don’t forget forging connection with another company so they can leap right off when the company they’re currently leeching is sinking.
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
And I made a career in IT from googling shit and remember the steps. Dont see the difference…
Skilled labor is just compressed unskilled labor, at the end of the day labor is labor.
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”
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 20s.
This is is just apologia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
Heavy weapons guy is an unskilled job.
You think you’re smarter? Maybe… Maybe…however I’d like to see you outsmart bullets!
What is classism/or a “classist” belief?
It’s a view that makes wages/income/capital the main determiner of social stratum. It can be used in the sense that it is a system that the burgeousie tries to secretly push onto the working class.
The only idiots that repeat this, are unskilled workers who have no idea what skilled workers do. Just assume they sit in a cubicle and browse Facebook all day for big money.
As others have said, your job is unskilled if you don’t need to be trained for many years to do it. A retail worker, in any position, can be trained very easily. Go from McDonald’s to Starbucks to Target. Same shit, different company. But from working the till at McDonald’s to being a neurosurgeon? Just a surgeon? A doctor of any kind? Yeah, no. That takes training and skill.
My guy do you think jumping on a teams meeting or using Excel and sending emails is difficult? Office work is unskilled work. Management is unskilled work. Having a degree didn’t suddenly make you a skilled worker. Hell, even sys administrator and programming are unskilled, all you have to know is how to Google stuff. They consider car mechanics unskilled for reference.
You’re proving my point. You have NO fucking idea what skilled labour is.
I’ll give you all my tools and lab equipment. Design a semiconductor. Do the electrical simulations at transistor level. Do the block level sims. Do the HDL. Do the layout. Send to fab, get it back, and now bring it up in the lab.
If I give you $1 billion if you did it yourself, you couldn’t.
These are skills that take 4 to 5 years minimum of training just to look like an idiot. Then another 10 years to start getting the hang of it. By the time you’re a gray beard with the mega skills and knowledge, it’s been 30+ years of hard skilled work. To know where to swing that proverbial hammer.
Office work is not just excel and PowerPoint. There is office work that is skilled. And idiots who don’t know what they don’t know, have no idea how hard it is. And will never know, because they’re too stupid to figure it out.
For a billion I would absolutely make it happen.
And by the time you did, 20 years later, you’d be a skilled worker!
Maybe we should call them extremely skilled workers.
It’s probably a lot harder without any social skills, lmao
It’s basically a job requirement
You are reverting to the capitalist brainwashing that has been repeated to you for your entire life.
Nobody is arguing that a grocery stocker requires less skill and training than brain surgery. Literally nobody. And yet you people repeat this idea over and over.
I mean this not as an attack on you but a chance to expand your worldview. Cognitive dissonance hurts, and it’s important to recognize when it’s happening so you can ask further questions.
There is no such thing as an “unskilled worker” because all jobs require skill. It’s called human skill, and it’s what enables us to build societies greater than the sum of its citizens.
The logical conclusion you are suggesting is that because some humans are less capable, they don’t deserve basic needs such as a home, reliable transportation, internet, food, utilities, etc.
And if your basic premise starts with the notion that society should not be meeting the basic needs of its people, then there’s only one thing that would convince you anyway.
Lol, you’re an idiot. I am a skilled worker. You couldn’t do my job to save your life.
I think you’re taking the terms too literally. Unskilled labor doesn’t actually mean the jobs require zero skill. It means they can be learned and mastered relatively quickly compared to other jobs. I’ve had many jobs and I’ve done both skilled and unskilled labor.
When I worked in retail I was able to learn the job in a day and master it in a month. For my current job as a software engineer I’ve been learning for over a decade and there’s still a lot I don’t know. The technology changes rapidly and you have to be constantly learning to keep up. I’m significantly better at my job now than I was when I only had 5 years of experience.
That said, ironically it’s people that work in skilled jobs that are generally the biggest advocates of social policies for the good of all. I believe everyone should have all of their basic needs met just for existing, and I would gladly pay more taxes to contribute to that goal.
Nobody is arguing that a grocery stocker requires less skill and training than brain surgery. Literally nobody. And yet you people repeat this idea over and over.
We know you aren’t arguing that every job requires the exact same degree of skill. All that we want to do is say that there are jobs whose required skills are quick to acquire and are therefore easily replaceable. Meanwhile, there are other jobs whose skills take a long time to acquire and are not easily replaceable. We use the term “unskilled labor” to refer to the former group and “skilled labor” to refer to the latter group as a point of convention. When people claim that unskilled labor doesn’t exist, they imply that every single job requires skills that are slow to obtain and therefore every worker is difficult to replace, which is clearly false.
I mean this not as an attack on you but a chance to expand your worldview. Cognitive dissonance hurts, and it’s important to recognize when it’s happening so you can ask further questions.
Where is the cognitive dissonance? Where is the contradiction in distinguishing between jobs that require trained applicants and jobs that don’t require trained applicants?
There is no such thing as an “unskilled worker” because all jobs require skill. It’s called human skill, and it’s what enables us to build societies greater than the sum of its citizens.
If you decide to use “skilled worker” to mean a worker who has a skill, then you are correct that “skilled workers” do not exist. Unfortunately, that’s not what the phrase “skilled worker” means. If that’s how you use the term, then you’re talking about something different to everyone else.
The logical conclusion you are suggesting is that because some humans are less capable, they don’t deserve basic needs such as a home, reliable transportation, internet, food, utilities, etc.
The logical conclusion of “unskilled labor exists” is simply that unskilled labor exists. You cannot jump from the observation that “unskilled labor exists” to the claim that “some people don’t deserve their basic needs.” It’s a non sequitur, and it’s not a position anyone in this thread would support.
And if your basic premise starts with the notion that society should not be meeting the basic needs of its people, then there’s only one thing that would convince you anyway.
This is a straw man. No one here has expressed the position that society shouldn’t meet the basic needs of its people. The position you are arguing against is the position that some jobs require training before hiring and others don’t. Again, that’s just what people mean when they refer to skilled labor and unskilled labor.
god damn right
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?
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.)
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.
Replace unskilled jobs with UBI jobs.
There’s jobs you can fake your way through in a week and there’s jobs that take six years to not kill people.
The cliche example is fast food because you really can do it badly on day one. Literacy is optional. English is negotiable. That’s unavoidably distinct from jobs that require higher math or high voltage. The fact a surgeon would do worse at flipping burgers than anyone who’s worked retail does not change how people skills and sticktoitiveness are no substitute for recognizing a tumor by sight.
We will always need a way to describe that gap. You’re welcome to suggest alternatives.
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?
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.
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.
Ever seen someone doing their “unskilled job” all their life?
Why yes, yes I have.
