No such thing as unskill labor. This phrase is pointed to push an image of saturation. If labor took no skill than why does a person need to do it? If it was so autonomous as to need no action at all, then it’s simply stagnant. Movement requires control of muscles, a skill learned early in life. A skill that one can loose if injury is sustained by the brain. A skill that can be learned twice if forgotten. A skill, nonetheless. Nothing a human does intentionally is unskilled. All intentional brain activity relies on skill. No matter how base that skill is, by definition, still a skill.
Playing games with the definition of the word “skill” doesn’t change the fact that these categories correctly predict market behavior regardless of the name you give them.
Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more skill /skil/ noun the ability to do something well.
What games am i playing with the definition?
You’re stubbornly refusing to accept that polysemy exists, and as a result are insisting that everyone else use your definition instead of the commonly accepted one.
Which, again, is all completely irrelevant since you can call these “A” and “B” and get exactly the same correct predictions.
Apparently everyone making less than $20 are essential not everyone else
When COVID hit I was working part time at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee, we were classified as essential because we shipped medical supplies, among other things. One day, I remember it vividly, we got a new manager, and so everyone, from all over the warehouse, had to gather together in the break area, nobody more than a foot apart, COVID safety on the TV screens, not a single mask, and what does the new manager talk about? Safety. Gives a whole speech about how much he cares about our safety!
That same day, my supervisor comes up to me and says, “We’ve had too many people calling out sick and faking it so we’re doing a new policy where if you’re sick, you still have to come into work and we’ll decide if you’re sick enough to send you home.” My only regret was not getting that shit in writing because that shit was straight up illegal. But I just quit on the spot.
In case anybody was curious about how I became a fucking communist.
While we absolutely need a higher minimum wage and better worker protections, “essential” and “unskilled” are not synonymous. You can have one without the other.
No such thing as unskilled labor. Period.
This is such a strange, nonsensical take to me. It’s not saying “these workers are good and those workers suck lol” - it’s just recognizing the fact that there are jobs that take years to develop the skills for, which has the consequence that (among others things) replacing these workers is incredibly difficult. And then there are jobs that take five minutes to learn to perform, where replacing workers is trivial.
You can put all the "period"s you want, but these different types of jobs objectively behave differently in the market - their differences have real consequences, which makes the distinction a useful one for describing market forces, whether you like it or not.
No such thing as unskilled labor. Give me one example. You argue semantics because by definition, Labor takes skill. Even walking is a skill.
You accuse me of arguing semantics, but you’re the one insisting on blindly using your own definition of the word and ignoring the fact that other useful definitions can exist as well.
But, just to make you happy, let’s rename these terms to “Group 1 jobs” and “Group A jobs” (to avoid potentially saying that one group is better because they have a lower number or letter). In doing so, we avoid using your trigger word “skill”, and can still arrive at the same useful objective distinction as follows:
We can define “Group 1 jobs” as ones that require years of job-specific instruction to perform successfully, and “Group A jobs” as ones that require minutes or days of instruction to perform.
And, as we see, regardless of the name we give them, these categories still correctly predict the behavior of market forces, and are therefore useful terms.
Is that better for you?
The word your looking for is: qualifications.
Again, the point is that for the most part the names don’t really matter. We can call them “bloopity jobs” and “glorbo jobs” and get exactly the same predictions - I’m sorry that people have given these categories names you don’t like, but the categories remain descriptive and useful nonetheless.
No, the point of “unskilled labor” as a phrase at all, is to enforce the dichotomy that not everyone deserves food and shelter. It reinforces the notion that a person deserves less than livable circumstances because they are not as “skilled” as you. This implies you don’t deserve to live if you don’t help the bottom line go up. It’s ableist at best and completely dishonest the way you twist it.
The pandemic proved just how stupid and useless most of the jobs we do are and which we actually should all be splitting up our time to do them because they’re essential.
We could all be working 15 hours a week in a veritable paradise of enforced abundance and sustainability.
We could even open up a new job type, Billionaire Hunter
Find a job you love…
We had rounds of applause here in Germany and then changed… absolutely nothing regarding those workers.
Oh shit. I thought “clapping for NHS workers” was a UK-only bout of absolute stupidity.
Here in Denver people would go outside at the predetermined time every night and howl at the sky, for the hospital workers.
E.g. Berlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rlbwft_Kr4
Stupid is, as stupid does.
My peak body, the Australian Computer Society is advocating that we should be happy with the wages earned in the late 1990’s, so clearly we’re not essential.
Source: https://ia.acs.org.au/content/ia/article/2023/it-teams--salaries--rebalancing--after-pandemic.html
My peak body
Show us 🥵
You might not like it, but 90s wages are peak body
-Australian Computer Society
This is how that went for me, working in the social/care sector (with kids):
During Covid we were praised. Except for a few weeks (in 2 years), we took care of their kids. Worked normally - not from home, obviously.
In this country, preschool childcare personnel are already on the bottom of the totem pole that is working anywhere in the social/care sector.
Of course, once we pushed through, we’d all get a raise! Right?!
Yeah, no, we got the corporate speech instead. How dire the situation is and that we must all pull together now: same shitty pay, more hours, less personnel, fewer days off. We had it too good so far (they really said that).
That was a few years ago already. I left the job. Other jobs aren’t better. Working with kids sucks in this country, because people with CEO-like delusions of grandeur want to “streamline” it, meaning fewer workers, more kids, less budget. The shitty pay isn’t even the most important thing tbh.
We all know where the bleeding dry of the social sector ends. This is the beginning.
The shitty pay isn’t even the most important thing tbh.
it absolutely is, even if it’s not pay that you receive, but if hospitals had more money, they could hire more employees and that’d reduce pressure on the single worker. That’s why it would still be a good thing.
Why couldn’t they work from home and take care of their own kids?
It’s a disease of greed and they won’t stop until it kills the very systems on which we all depend.
Same applies to the military and our veterans. “Best I can do is Thank you for your service”.
My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the '90s and got full medical and dental benefits for life for himself and his civilian wife, simply because he made it to retirement.
I retired from the US Air Force in 2022 and I had to qualify for 100% disability through the VA before they gave me the same deal. And that was only for me; my wife had to serve and get her own 100% disability rating to also qualify for those benefits.
Crazy how much things can change in 30 years.
to be fair, a military in this day and age is used as a hegemonic weapon for capitalism’s desires and a state’s choice to genocide. those who knowingly volunteer for that deserve to be reminded what they joined at every chance we can get.
“Why do they always send the poor?” – B.Y.O.B by System of a Down
You fail to remember that a lot of the meat the military machine runs on, the actual soldiers, is comprised of poor and or uneducated folk, and those with few better prospects. And why do they not have better prospects? Because the system we live in is designed to keep you uneducated and under economic slavery so that it never runs out of meat for that grinder.
i do not fail to remember it. The solution, truly, is to do locally exactly what the US does abroad.
I understand why, I just think it’s a deplorable choice and I can’t respect volunteering for it.
They go through the grinder due to propaganda. They come out of it right wing asses spreading more propaganda but hey, flyovers at super bowls and preboarding flights!
Schrödinger’s Essential Worker
Anything to make you keep living for them.
