Unskilled work means you don’t need prior experience or specific education to apply.
It means whatever the employers want it to mean. But anyone who has worked anywhere for a significant length of time knows the value experience brings in a role.
Whether you’re packing boxes or picking fruit or doing brain surgery, the speed and accuracy of your work is predicated on experience. Not something you get through a crash course or a certificate. You have to do the work to learn the work in every field.
OK what do you propose we call it when there is a job that literally requires prior experience or certifications vs a job that doesn’t?
Any job can be regulated.
In Texas, cosmetology students must complete a minimum of 1,000 hours of instruction at an accredited beauty school to become licensed.
In Oregon, no such license is required.
Does this mean a cosmetologist’s status as “skilled worker” evaporates upon stepping off a plane from Houston to Portland?
Because you cannot tell me that it’s OK to hire anyone and teach them brain surgery on the job.
That’s exactly what professional hospital surgeries do. They identify candidates for hire and train them with their veteran staff.
Nobody is born knowing brain surgery. Nobody is born with a number of successful surgeries under their belts. Everyone starts from square one.
What makes brain surgery different from HVAC repair isn’t skill, its liability. If you fuck up a unit then you’ve caused a few hundred dollars in damage. If you fuck up a brain, you kill someone.
But they both require skill and experience to do reliably and efficiently.
It means whatever the employers want it to mean. But anyone who has worked anywhere for a significant length of time knows the value experience brings in a role.
Whether you’re packing boxes or picking fruit or doing brain surgery, the speed and accuracy of your work is predicated on experience. Not something you get through a crash course or a certificate. You have to do the work to learn the work in every field.
That’s what makes “unskilled” labor a myth.
OK what do you propose we call it when there is a job that literally requires prior experience or certifications vs a job that doesn’t?
Because you cannot tell me that it’s OK to hire anyone and teach them brain surgery on the job.
I like the term “specialized” vs “unspecialized”. It better describes what it actually means.
Any job can be regulated.
In Texas, cosmetology students must complete a minimum of 1,000 hours of instruction at an accredited beauty school to become licensed.
In Oregon, no such license is required.
Does this mean a cosmetologist’s status as “skilled worker” evaporates upon stepping off a plane from Houston to Portland?
That’s exactly what professional hospital surgeries do. They identify candidates for hire and train them with their veteran staff.
Nobody is born knowing brain surgery. Nobody is born with a number of successful surgeries under their belts. Everyone starts from square one.
What makes brain surgery different from HVAC repair isn’t skill, its liability. If you fuck up a unit then you’ve caused a few hundred dollars in damage. If you fuck up a brain, you kill someone.
But they both require skill and experience to do reliably and efficiently.