That's why its not called unneeded labor
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Anyone who has worked "unskilled" positions can tell you that every job has a learning curve and experience counts for a lot.
This is particularly true in jobs that require a degree of physical endurance and manual dexterity. Picking a vegetable is easy. Picking a thousand vegetables an hour (without bruising the produce or ruining the plant) for eight hours a day is quite difficult. And skilled workers are far more lucrative to the farm owner than clumsy neophytes.
What often defines a service worker as "unskilled" isn't the work, but the degree to which automated capital and real estate ownership are integrated into the workflow. The more leverage the employer can exert over the hiring market, the more easily they classify labor as "unskilled"' and downgrade the pay.
Nicole when she is not catfishing Lemmy users.
Skilled or unskilled. If you do a full day's work, you should be able to support yourself and family.
We should also take care of those that are unable to do so.
No labor is unskilled it's classist bullshit to make us think we're better than each other. Farm work especially so since there are weird local tricks for local planting styles and crops.
Only because society won't let prisons pay their prisoners 10¢ an hour to flip hamburgers at McDonald's. That's the next step to avoid collapse of the average standard of living.
When you start really thinking about it, often unskilled jobs are nearly all the necessary jobs for humanity to survive. No one is going to suffer if your PhD army can no longer update twitter, I'm afraid to name the percentage, but most skilled jobs are useless in the sense that they're not really making anything of value.
I think SEO jobs are good example of this.
I disagree. Without Frtiz Haber inventing nitrogen fertilizer there wouldn't even be people to do unskilled labor.
This class battle has to stop. All economic fields are productive given that the market is valuing it. What's not productive is corruption and hoarding and middle manager fiddling. We have science to determine all that so we don't even need to gut feel this out.
Someone researching "transgender mice" can low key add more value than thousands or millions of "unskilled laborers". We need to diversify and value all avenues of our collective production and growth because thats just a smart thing to do. Except for billionaires and hoarders which clearly are a net negative.
Putting skills in the right place does help. Your postdoc in agricultural sustainability will help all the "unskilled" agricultural labourers. Without you, they produce less in the long run. But without them, you get nothing at all.
That's no accident. A job is considered "unskilled" (or "unspecialized" as I like to call it) if any adult who's gone through the education system and is reasonably healthy can do. Since society would collapse without these jobs, we want to do everything we can to make sure we always have people who can do them. How do you make that happen? By designing the education system to teach everyone the skills to do them and making it mandatory to complete your schooling. As a result, nearly everyone is capable of doing some of the most important jobs for our society.
Good point. But not just from planned education, I think. Most jobs can be done with a body and mind in moderate working order - our bodies and minds are amazing things! Picking fruit does not require a school education, nor does laying bricks require a gym routine. Though laying them straight needs training, reading instructions needs literacy and reporting results needs numeracy. Education helps.
It's wild that no one can look up how unskilled labor is actually defined.
Unskilled labor is kind of a misnomer. Perhaps the word should change to match what it is trying to say.
Or perhaps people should not expect that every turn of phrase is a colloquialism?
Why not?
Because nuanced discussion often requires context where colloquialisms typically don't. You could absolutely say "jobs that require no specialized training at the outset", but if you're writing a paper or having a technical discussion in a labor field, that is really cumbersome. It's easier to pick a context-appropriate one or two word solution. This is generally called a term of art.
It's worth looking up "term of art" for a few more examples if my description didnt do it for you.
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