So you think a barista should be paid as much as a surgeon or nurse practitioner, both with more than a decade of education and correlated schooling expenses?
Can I have some of whatever you're smoking?
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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The meme isn't saying that they should be paid the same, it's saying that just because you're a janitor doesn't mean you deserve to be living off of ramen packets and 4 hours of sleep every day.
A janitor is skilled labour though.
So the issue is already moot because people don't even understand the nuances in the job market.
A janitor can kill people if they don't do their job properly, or themselves, if they use any of their tools improperly. It can take several years for a professional cleaner to become well trained.
An unskilled labour position would be a cashier or barista. A farmer requires years of training and should be paid according to the amount of effort it takes to become a trained farmer. The cook (used to) require a red seal, which is several years training, now days it's microwave/fry/flip and is thus unskilled into robot replacement.
The examples even used in the meme suck. The landscaper and construction workers are absolutely skilled labour.
This is trying to 'equalize' the job market but you can't do that. Different jobs require different training and you should be paid accordingly. The only people 'justifying' poverty wages are the billionaires, no one else thinks that 7 dollars is appropriate, however, by trying to push this meme the OP and a lot of people in the replies are trying to pretend like 'any job that doesn't have a degree associated is 'unskilled labour' according to capitalists' but that's not the case, and even the investing market doesn't believe that, i.e. 'da capitalists'.
A batista can kill by using incorrect cleaning chemicals, wrong ingredients to those who may be allergic, or who knows wtf. Food workers have food safety.
Don't be so silly.
All labor involves skill. You can be skilled at anything and experience enhances that skill. The only question is if people value that skill. Most people value a skilled janitor; a skilled gardener; a skilled customer service representative; etc. I know I do.
Idk man my labour is pretty unskilled, I think anyone could do it really (I'm a middle manager)
It just means "no prior knowledge required". It's not a myth lol
Every fucking time:
It's a distinction between "on-the-job training will suffice" and "no chance without years of prep."
No shit anything worth paying a human for involves human skills. But some jobs are open to just about anyone who can put up with it, and some jobs kill people when you try to muscle through on sticktoitiveness. A fast food restaurant can bring some rando up-to-speed in a couple weeks. An ER cannot. The distinction is necessary.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn't fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people's time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don't get to be a business.
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
All labor that delivers value in excess of the wage deserves a living wage.
I think unskilled there just implies no prerequisite knowledge required
That's just entry level. There's plenty of entry level skilled labor out there.
Entry level means something different for every field. An entry level cook and an entry level engineer have two different sets of expectations for the employee.
All of which are skilled labor
You are confusing chefs with cooks. Line cooks are hired with no experience or training, the same cannot be said for chefs.
You are confusing line cooks with dishwashers. No one hires a line cook that has no experience or training.
No experience necessary for line cooks.
You're talking to an actual chef with over 20 years of hiring experience. You don't hire line cooks with no experience.
You may not hire line cooks without experience at your restaurant but there are a whole bunch of resturants that do. Places like Applebees don't require experience or formal training.
Because it's unskilled.
I could walk into McDonald's tomorrow and in a day have nearly every thing I'll ever need for the job.
"Unskilled" and "requiring no previous qualificatuons" aren't the same thing. Even "unskilled" labor can have many qualifications, even if most people would meet said qualifications. Hell, some people even don't meet the qualifications for McDonalds for various reasons that are unrelated to skill. And similarly labor that requires no previous qualifications can still be labelled "unskilled".
The difference here is that you can go into McDonald's and learn on the job with little to no difficulty in the process.
"Patties are found in the freezer here. Go into the freezer, grab a box, put it here, take out and put 9 on the grill, grab these salt & pepper shakers and shake once overtop and then press this button; once it beeps it's done and you throw them all into this warmer here." Jobs been mainly taught and you can rock that for a whole shift.
OP is using McDonald's as it's pretty universal to know the basics of life on that part. Like how to press a button, what a freezer is, how to carry something and how to move objects without ruining things.
Go ahead and try to teach someone how to be a doctor/dentist with the same common knowledge. Or how to get someone to program an application when they only know how to turn on an iPad and open an app.
Difficulty is subjective. Like yeah, to me and most people the jobs labelled "unskilled labour" are going to be easy and being a doctor or dentist is going to be hard, nobody's arguin that. But it gets a lot fuzzier when you start getting into seemingly low-skilled jobs which are put at higher value and labelled "skilled labor", and seemingly high-skilled jobs which are put at lower value and labelled "unskilled labor". This is especially apparent with manual labor (including some trades).
Plus it completely ignores the fact that things that are hard to one person can come extremely easily to another, and vice versa. Not every fast food employee can be a lawyer, but not every lawyer can be a fast food employee. Surprisingly, employers for "low-skill" jobs can be very picky with employees. And there exists extremely low-skill lawyers just like there exist extremely low-skill fast food employees. Same with teachers. The only difference in this case is that being a lawyer requires you to pay tens to hundreds of thousands for a degree, so the barrier for entry is artificially higher for poorer people.
Right now the case is mostly just that jobs considered low-value by society are called "unskilled labor" while jobs considered high-value by society are called "skilled labor" despite not being higher in actual skill used or required. Even disregarding manual labor, I wouldn't consider my office job particularly high skill, it has a low barrier to entry and anyone could reasonably get a similar position with very little time investment, but it's lumped into "skilled labor" just because it pays a lot and people don't view it with a stigma like they do with low-paying jobs. Hell a lot of middle managers know absolutely nothing about the job of the people they manage, but they get labelled as "skilled laborers" anyways.
Difficulty has nothing to do do with skilled or unskilled labor. Skilled labor is labor that requires formal training and/or significant experience, unskilled labor usually entails on the job training that lasts less than a week.
What are the high skilled jobs that are labeled unskilled labor?
Farmworkers, custodians, construction workers, and similar manual labor are labelled as "unskilled labor" yet they generally require a lot of training to do correctly. And paradoxically other trades are seen as highly skilled jobs, despite requiring a similar level of experience or training.
Also in fast food training generally lasts more than a week. Idk where you got the "lasting one week" figure. And similarly, a significant portion of "skilled labor" jobs have no training at all (as I said, office jobs often don't have any training whatsoever even for entry-level positions).
Different job positions of the same type or in the same field require different amounts of training, expertise, etc., and trying to generalize them into categories based on what one feels is right is pretty much just a method to demean/stigmatize certain types of labor.
And by the way, difficulty being subjective is relevant because someone who finds little difficulty in a certain area may take very little to no training to be qualified for a "skilled" job, while someone who finds great difficulty in the area will take much training to be qualified for an "unskilled" job. There are plenty of people who initially have trouble doing tasks that you and I think of as simple and requiring little skill. Many "unskilled" jobs require people skills too, on the account that they have to deal with the worst behaved humans imaginable on a regular basis and get around that. Those especially require you to have a lot of skill often times, not unlike how necessary communication skills are in some skilled labor jobs (a tech position may be practically entirely built around communication and the actual "tech" part matters little).
Farmworkers, custodians, construction workers, and similar manual labor are labelled as “unskilled labor” yet they generay require a lot of training to do correctly.
Farm workers it depends on the job, running & maintaining machinery yes, picking vegetables no. Same with construction, their are unskilled jobs and trade jobs (skilled), plumber, electrician, carpenter, mason.
Also in fast food training generally lasts more than a week. Idk where you got the “lasting one week” figure. And similarly, a significant portion of “skilled labor” jobs have no training at all (as I said, office jobs often don’t have any training whatsoever even for entry-level positions).
Fast food workers are not training for a whole week, they're shown a task and do it. The training is only 20 or 30 minutes. You are correct skilled labor positions don't have on the job training the expectation is that they all ready posses the skills.
Different job positions of the same type or in the same field, believe it or not, require different amounts of training, expertise, etc., and trying to generalize them into categories based on what one feels is right is pretty much just a method to demean/stigmatize certain types of labor.
Strange that you're making that argument while generalizing farmers, construction workers and similar manual labor.
Skilled labor is just labor where the person is expected to have formal training, unskilled is where there is not an expectation. I'm sorry that you look down on unskilled labor and consider it derogatory.
Man your perception of the world is really upside-down. Everything you say is pretty egregious but especially the "fast food workers are not training for a whole week, it's in 30 minutes" shows a lack of understanding of the real world. There's nothing that makes being a plumber or electrician inherently more skilled than being a fast food worker. I would know because I come from a family of people who work(ed) those exact jobs (electrician, plumber, lineman, etc.) and it generally doesn't require any more experience or skill than "unskilled" labor, which I have worked and training for most people has never lasted below 2 weeks of on-the-job training. When's the last time you worked a fast food job..?
Also pulling the "aha, by saying X is a tool for discrimination so you must discriminate based on that" is just sad. It's the same thing Republicans do, "you're pointing out racism, but it is in fact you who is the racist one because only a racist would think about how X is used as a tool to divide people". It's a cop-out.
There’s nothing that makes being a plumber or electrician inherently more skilled than being a fast food worker.
That might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Let's take a plumber they need to be proficient in welding, soldering, pipe fitting, building codes, ... It more than just how to use a plunger.
What are fast food workers training on for 40 hours? What skill do fast food workers starting out posses that's equivalent to welding a high pressure pipe that will pass x-ray inspection.
There's no reason to be defensive about unskilled labor, it's not claiming they are mindless idiots, just that they didn't receive formal training to do their job.