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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.