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"unskilled labor" What an extremely elitist phrase.
by xibo9 4y ago
"unskilled labor"
What an extremely elitist phrase.
- moooo99 4y ago> What an extremely elitist phrase. This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.
- busterarm 4y agoYou're certainly glad that your uber driver can't be suddenly promoted to airline pilot though, right?
- bigbillheck 4y agoUber drivers have to pass an examination by the state which usually requires many hours of lessons and supervised training. How is that unskilled?
- busterarm 4y ago85% of Americans have a driver's license too.
- bigbillheck 4y agoA skill being common doesn't make it no longer a skill.
- busterarm 4y agoBut common skills don't command elevated wages.
- bigbillheck 4y agoWe're not talking about wages, we're talking about who counts as 'skilled labor'.
- goodpoint 4y agoSo what? Besides, driving a car safely is very much a skill. It's life-saving by definition.
- moooo99 4y agoSo you would define an airline pilot as skilled labor but driving an Uber (I have never used Uber, so I will compare it to a taxi) as unskilled labor. Flying a plain certainly takes a skill. So does driving a car. Both are skills. They certainly differ in the time required to obtain that skill, but that does not change the fact than an unskilled person can't drive a car through dense urban traffic bringing you safely to your destination, neither can they land a an airplane. If a job was really unskilled, anybody could do it without any training at all. People usually don't pay for actually unskilled things because they can do it themselves just as good
- totony 4y agoDo you have a better term for it?
- noSyncCloud 4y agoMore exploited | Less exploited?
- triceratops 4y agoHigh-paid/low-paid labor?
- totony 4y agoSkill is a proxy for supply whereas pay is a proxy of supply-demand. It might actually be a better term, since even if you do very skilled labor, you would prefer an union if there was no demand.
- bpodgursky 4y agoThis is a terrible substitute, since there are a lot of low-paid high-skill jobs (ex, graduate students, TAs). There's a meaningful labor liquidity difference between a job that takes 2 years of training and 2 days of training, and it's important for policy decisions. Sorry?
- totony 4y agoBut aren't those low-paid, high skill jobs likely to be unionized? Only issue I see with that term is that union affects pay.
- bpodgursky 4y agoI am not trying to argue about the merits of unionization. I am saying that "low-skill" is a meaningful term we should not drop.
- busterarm 4y agoBack in my younger years, I worked a lot of unskilled-labor type jobs. The starkest difference that I recognize between people in those jobs and people in my career is that in the former people have a hard time showing up to work on-time or at all and in the latter everyone is pretty tuned in and works hard. It only hit me late in life that success in life really can be just as simple as showing up. I guess what I would say here is that the kind of people who feel that they need collective bargaining agreements probably overlaps quite strongly with the group of people that have a hard time showing up.
- busterarm 4y agoIt's not elitist. Some skills are effectively commoditized. They don't require specialized, rare knowledge, years of training and constant personal investment. If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.
- foobarian 4y agoI mean, it is elitist. Is that inaccurate? What I don't get is why that is supposed to be bad. It's just a fact.
- function_seven 4y ago"Elitist" is almost always used as a pejorative. Just looking up the definition of it points to social power, wealth, class hierarchies, etc. It is rarely used to just mean "smart, capable, skilled" in a neutral sense. The comment above was clearly using it as a pejorative.
- sershe 4y agoThank you for complimenting the above insightful comment! :)