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Depends what you mean by “unskilled labour”. Literally no skills? Yeah that doesn’t exist, and is impossible to exist as even the most simple of motor tasks like walking are learned and therefore “skills”.
If by “unskilled labour” you mean jobs that require no formal training and your average person could be trained up well enough to not need to be constantly trained/supervised in a week or two? Then there’s lots of those. Maybe “low skilled labour” is slightly better but still a bit misleading (you still develop skills and improve in those jobs, it’s just you’re “good enough” at it in a relatively short period of time).
Because capitalism, when you’re easily replaceable it means the employer can shop around more and find people willing you did the job for less so the pay is low. You aren’t paid by how hard you work, but by the “value” you bring and how hard it is to find someone else.
Yeah, I’d argue ‘unskilled labour’ or ‘low skilled labour’ doesn’t necessarily mean you should be paid poverty wages.
Imo that’s a regulation/policy issue, not a capitalism issue, but I’m happy for someone to talk me through why that isn’t the case.
The problem is that you aren’t paid by the value you bring. We have to fight tooth and nail to get even a fraction of what we’re worth, even in skilled jobs, and there are many executives that realized that they’re better off instilling fear of firing into people than they are worrying about whether or not someone can be replaced. Hell, most of them don’t even have the barest respect for senior workers and will happily replace them with a less skilled, but also cheaper, worker to save a buck in the short-term.
The concept of supply and demand in jobs has died because we lack the ability to enforce it. It’s completely fucked up. I heard someone say recently that it shouldn’t be a “job market” but a “labour market” and I fully agree. They need us, most executives are just dead-weight with money, so why the fuck do they get to be the beggars and the choosers?
Ultimately, if we were paid based on the value we bring then CEOs wouldn’t be getting millions of dollars of bonuses while laying people off to try to keep their own worthless jobs for just one more quarter. If we were paid based on the value we bring then millions of essential workers would be in a much better position but instead they can’t even get raises that match inflation. Like, if your workplace doesn’t, at the very least, give you an inflation-based adjustment to your salary before ever even getting to a true raise then that place is taking you for a ride.
Like, if your workplace doesn’t, at the very least, give you an inflation-based adjustment to your salary before ever even getting to a true raise then that place is taking you for a ride.
Do places actually do this? Pay rises in line with inflation first? I’ve never heard of this :(
Basically never! My roommate’s did, which is super nice to hear, but when I asked my last place they told me “that’s not how inflation works” because they’re dumb as rocks and half as useful.
In reality there’s no “cultural difference” nonsense, it’s just basic math, but most managers and executives are fragile, selfish men who never had to learn how to communicate their feelings or recieve even the lightest, most gentle criticism.
It absolutely should be how inflation works. The cost of everything has gone up, right? That includes the cost of my labour. Or, well, it should.
Precisely. Even in our broken system pay is directly associated with the lifestyle we believe that said job should merit and yet when that lifestyle gets more costly our salaries do not increase. It’s like, it doesn’t work in any fair manner and the way it claims to work is just there as an excuse to slowly erode the dignity of the people who just keep getting poorer each year while never actually doing anything in line with that claim.
I mean I get where you’re coming from, but you don’t get to set your own worth: your worth–and the worth of anything you try to sell–is only what someone is willing to pay for it. The only way to fix this is regulation and proper care for setting and maintaining wage rules or just cutting the shit and going to a UBI system.
Yea that’s that first bit is exactly the kind of bullshit that gets repeated enough times to make people believe that it’s true but it’s total bullshit just like “just get another job if you don’t like it.” It’s very half-way correct but still missing some major nuance that you admit can be tackled with regulation. I know you’re just repeating a well-worn phrase but it’s entirely rooted in pushing the blame onto individuals to minimize their power.
If the companies can’t afford to give their employees a basic, even somewhat dignified quality of life then that means that the company is not deserving of existence and their leadership is clearly unqualified to handle the situation. If I can’t get more money “just because I want it” then they don’t get to have a company “just because they want it and at the expense of all the people doing the real work”.
Seriously, the very concept of minimum wage is tied to the fact that we do know what a minimum amount to live a dignified life costs. And, just in case, if you plan on saying “but minimum wage wasn’t meant to-“ it was, and it was extremely clear that it was.
I’m not repeating anything, this is how it is:
If a company will pay you X to do a thing, but someone else will do it for X-1, then that company would be stupid not to do it. It is a race to the bottom cost for the same work. We have to regulate that minimum value. The company holds the cards, and that’s the whole point of unions and collective bargaining. Of course federal rules like minimum wage, OSHA, child labor laws, and so on supercede even that.
Unfortunately our need to work is inelastic: no money from income means no food, clothing, or shelter. This is why I bring up UBI. Then you really COULD set the value below which you would not work, and also you wouldn’t lose the things you need.
As for whether or not companies are deserving, that’s a totally different imaginary moral high ground that has nothing to do with the discussion infortunately. As long as companies provide a good or service people will buy, and enough is bought that profit is higher than cost, then they go on existing even if its exploitative. This is what rules are for.
The proposition of goodness and worth, and rules and methods is up to society by way of law.
I’m struggling to figure out why most of what you’ve written to me is coming off as a disagreement despite us both clearly knowing that regulation and UBI are good solutions. It’s like you’re both sides of the argument without the nuance to connect them and it’s just coming off as difficult to follow. Like, what was your intention with your responses?
Remember, all I know about you and the context that is your opinion is a couple paragraphs and a vague trust that you’re sane based on the support of a social safety net.
I think it is mostly that I disagree with the premise that all work people do is inherently worth much more than corpos pay for it, and every job has high inherent value.
It just isn’t like that. In the real world there are things that need done that basically any warm body can fill. If that is all a person can do, that sucks. It doesn’t make that person less of a person, but it doesn’t mean the work is a high calling. People exist who are not skilled and who are not smart and who are not special.
So here is the crux for me:
We as a society gotta take care of our people. All of them. It is the good and just thing to do. That means everybody gets money and gets to eat and live, and a fair and equitable shake at success and happiness. But it doesn’t make people special and valuable, or put corpos at moral fault for doing corpo stuff, or elevate the importance of stamp kicking, or any of that. I don’t like the kumbayah smoke blowing, but it brings us to the same eventualities I guess.
You lose me when you say that essential workers who do jobs that need less training somehow aren’t creating high value for anyone. Those jobs need to be done, and while a janitor isn’t making a product to be sold that doesn’t mean that without them the company can function properly enough for those do make the product to produce it.
If someone has “taken one for the team” and decided to get into garbage collection then they cannot be reasonably expected to have time to pursue a “higher calling”, and nor should they need to. But imagine if we didn’t have them, or if it paid so poorly that the job couldn’t be done well because frankly no one should put in any good effort for shitty pay. Or how we have culturally decided that, training or no, construction work is something that not very smart people get into. And those people are more likely to have shorter careers dude to the wear and tear on their bodies but their pay does not compensate for that.
A lack of understanding of how indirect value is created, or an inability to consider the fact that someone asked to use up their work hours on something other than a “career” job needs to be able to care for themselves all the same, does not validate poor treatment and a lack of pay.
And oh boy if you want to get into “high calling” nonsense look at the low pay of nurses, family doctors, most architects, junior engineers, etc. It’s all deemed important by the employers to hire someone to do the job and is therefore important enough to pay properly. Just because the degradation of our lives has happened slowly does not make it natural, and no amount of saying “this is the real world” will change that.
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Minimum wage hasn’t increased in decades in North America. Us in Canada got a bit of a bump but ultimately it’s still lagging way behind. When the idea was introduced as policy we could afford it just fine but now each year inflation increases without our paying keepinng up the extra money just fills a billionaires pockets. It wasn’t long ago that a millionaire was seen as the richest person imaginable and now we have multi-billionaires in only a few decades. The money was there and we agreed that everyone deserved to live with dignity and it’s still here just in the pockets of a handful of people.
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Oh, and economies are stronger when there are more small transactions compared to only a few big ones. Giving more of the money to individuals is a recipe for success and taking it away from them is how we are where we are. People are valuable and deserve dignity and even if you hate them and think otherwise it’s still got for stable business and strong, robust economy.
That’s the point, the myth is always about “unskilled labour” and that’s specifically what pro-capitalist people believe - that low skill is the same as unskilled and low wages workers are “unskilled” and that’s why they deserve to stay where they are because they are brainless. And I am obviously above that, so you better not raise the lowest wages to the same as my level, it would be an insult to my skills that I totally have and they don’t. That is specifically the message and the brainwashing.
It’s supply and demand. If there are only a few of a thing, we pay more for it, if there are a lot of a thing then we (mostly) buy what is cheapest. This is the labor equivalent. There are people who will go out of their way to not buy the cheapest thing if it comes from Walmart or Amazon or whatever. Living wages are basically this (instead of hiring undocumented workers for pennies on the dollar) and it is always a good idea.
Leaving aside the metaphor, you can raise the wages as high as you like, but someone has to be willing to pay for it. If you mandate that every cashier must make at least $40 per hour, those jobs will be automated out of existence. It is really better IMO to start with universal basic income and go from there. Them if you don’t have any particular marketable service you can provide, at least you still get to eat and have a place to live.
Draw all the academic distinctions you like.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Face up to the fact.
Don’t muzzle the oxen who is treading your grain. It’s the least you can do after taking his balls.
There’s jobs you can fake after an hour of training and there’s jobs that need six years to not kill people.
Minimum wage is supposed to be enough for one income to comfortably raise a family.
But we have to have this conversation, from scratch, every fucking time someone reposts this image. I’m beginning to understand why Socrates hated writing. You can prove a book wrong, and the book’s still there, being wrong.
Not sure farmers and bricklayers are considered unskilled…
From a government perspective they are. If you ever try to immigrate to one of the “desired countries” you’ll quickly find out how worthless the average worker is in the eye of a pen pusher.
In the US, bricklayers and masons are considered skilled construction jobs.
https://esub.com/blog/unskilled-semi-skilled-skilled-labor-defined/
Try to immigrate to the US and see how true that is. I’m also in a profession sources like that state as being skilled work but come application time, I was deemed worthless due to my profession, despite there being an outcry for workers.
Because countries don’t generally need average workers. What they most often lack is educated workers skilled in one thing or the other.
What do you expect?
“Hi! I’m merely average. Can I come in?”
The answer to this point is in a comment further down. But the point you’re missing is how often professions are downplayed as unskilled. Someone messes up in my field and someone dies, but that’s considered unskilled despite it being a profession where there’s constantly an outcry for more workers.
Very certainly farm-hands and manual laborers are.
I’ll give you farm-hands, and there are plenty of manual labor jobs that fall under the unskilled category, but bricklayers certainly are not among them. Simply a poor example in that specific case. The rest of the graphic is fine.
A lot of farmhands operate million dollar combines and tractors pulling additional millions in implements. If a heavy duty equipment operator is “skilled” then you might have to rethink that one.
not sure if you’re trying to argue with me or speaking rhetorically
Sounds like you’re saying all farmhands are “unskilled”. I’m offering a counterpoint.
I am saying nobody is “unskilled”. You need to work on your reading comprehension and not just look for an online argument
Comment you replied to:
Not sure farmers and bricklayers are considered unskilled…
Your reply:
Very certainly farm-hands and manual laborers are (unskilled).
Maybe read that again and see if you can understand why I came to the conclusion you were agreeing with that poster. I don’t expect you will change your mind, but in my experience, you modify the adjective to what you would want your statement to agree with, and in the absence of changing it, you’re just carrying on with that adjective.
Edit: I’m not here to make an argument, but explain why I thought you were saying the opposite. I’m not going to reply to anything here, because you’re apparently thinking the worst of anyone that comments in a way you take to be adversarial. So, carry on.
“Very certainly farm-hands and manual laborers are [considered unskilled]”
Did you know that aircraft mechanics were considered unskilled labor until the job was “reclassified” during the Cold War due to the demand for laborers?
From a cultural sense, both farmers and bricklayers are absolutely considered unskilled by the general public. The average person makes no difference between the generic construction labor usually done by illegal immigrants (in the US) and a bricklayer.
In college I finally understood the quadratic equation. We had to use it to calculate the optimal amount of fertilizer to spread per acre.
The masonry field is skilled in design, engineering, etc. Bricklayers, not so much.
I mean, how much you get paid is usually related to how hard you are to replace. If it takes 1 week, 3 months, 1 year training, or a PHD in biomolecular engineering with 2 years of training.
They should make different amounts of money. It’s an investment in people, and you have to pay them more to keep them.
It’s just supply and demand. It doesn’t matter how long you have to be trained or how many PhDs you have. Like it takes years to become a decent 3D animator, but those guys get paid peanuts compared to many other jobs that require the same amount of training. Since there are thousands of desperate fresh grad animators looking for a job every year. For every job at Pixar there is a line waiting for someone to get fired.
Also why for example plumbers and electricians get paid really well nowadays sometimes more than people with advanced degrees. Since there is a shortage of plumbers and electricians.
I have a PhD and this isn’t true unfortunately. Most of my friends with PhDs struggle to find work relevant to their field.
I’d also like to know how much time it takes to train a CEO who makes half a million dollars a year.
This has been posted before, but it’s still very very relevant.
I’ll note that a bricklayer isn’t “unskilled” to anyone. Apart from that, I think this is fairly accurate overall.
In addition, I’ll note that “class” is also a myth. “Upper”/“middle”/“lower” classes don’t actually exist. It’s just a term to refer to people who are seen to be more/less affluent, and has no bearing on reality.
The only “class” I care about is the bottom 90%, struggling to make ends meet. The top 1% can go fuck themselves. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a class war, it’s a 90% vs 1% war, and we have the numbers.
I’ll note that a bricklayer isn’t “unskilled” to anyone. Apart from that, I think this is fairly accurate overall.
I lay a few bricks in the toilet every day. Doesn’t take any skill to do that.
Amazon dude just casually flashing society. Can’t blame him, though, that’s what I’d do.
I think he’s peeing in a bottle because Amazon harshly discourages taking breaks.
The way y’all talk about capitalism makes it sound like a conspiracy.
Is it? There are mind numbing jobs invented by capital but they do exist
Bullshit jobs often tend to be better paid however. No paper pusher is getting paid minimum wage iirc
From my own experience I can tell you that bullshit jobs are paid quite good but that’s beside my point.
Unskilled labor is less a myth but rather a strategy of capital. In the past you needed skilled masons to build a house or what ever. Now you rather use concrete, a material anyone can learn to work which makes the worker expendable. Same with factories where skilled craftsmen were replaced by production line workers, reduced to barely more than extensions of the machine. This is really happening, it’s not a myth, it’s a way to take away our dignity. Bullshit jobs are a similar but different phenomenon.
I am not sure if we’re even disagreeing here. “Removing our dignity” and “poverty wages” are two sides of the same coin.
My problem is the term “myth”. It implies that unskilled labor doesn’t exist. It argue it does exist because of capital and shouldn’t
I disagree. It doesn’t exist. Nobody is “unskilled”.
That’s a different question and I disagree with the implicated identification of people and their occupation. You can put a shoemaker skilled to produce shoes all by themself and sit them on a pipeline with one simple task. They, as a person, are still skilled even though their skill isn’t wanted anymore by capital, and still their job is unskilled.
Putting skilled people into unskilled jobs is taking away their dignity. And since nobody is unskilled, unskilled jobs shouldn’t exist.
Even then, I disagree. Even in the simplest of task, one can get very skilled at it. You can easily tell the difference between a newbie and a veteran on a production line.
I also disagree that these sort of unskilled jobs shouldn’t exist. There’s benefit to this sort of separation of duties. If people want to organize to do it on their own, without hierarchical coercion, I don’t see a problem with it.
Can you build your own house, concrete or otherwise? No? That couldn’t possibly be because there is skill involved in building a house even from concrete, could it? 🤔🙄🙄🙄
No job is “unskilled”, no matter how much better it makes you feel about yourself (literally the point - to divide the working class further and give people an easy high horse to jump on to so they can punch down at their peers).
I’m not punching down. Giving unskilled jobs to skilled people is wrong. It takes away their potential for personal growth. And even these unskilled jobs contribute more to society than my academic bullshit job.
Where we disagree is, you say calling a pipeline job unskilled is doing injustice to the person performing the job. I say giving the job to someone is already doing injustice to them.
I am honestly curious if there’s a list of jobs that more or less only require a pulse.
All labor is skilled. It is possible to fuck up even the simplest job if you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t give a shit. If you have a job and you’re not getting fired for incompetence then you are skilled at it
