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.
So 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
It'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.
"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.
Back 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.
Yes grampa, the disadvantaged kid who never got a chance to learn a "skilled job" should just pull himself by the bootstraps, show up, give the manager a firm handshake. Yawn.
I worked shitty jobs into my 30s before I landed on my career. Suck it up.
Also you're missing the point. I didn't say anything about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You DON'T have to work hard. I said just show up. Every day. On time. That's literally the one thing I've seen in life that differentiates people who are successful in life from those who aren't.
And I know bank security guards who show up every day and live fulfilled happy successful lives. What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day. Not all of them but a large number. They won't do the minimum to succeed in life. They need the coddling.
I'm sorry, but your impression is wrong. The biggest correlate with income is not your punctuality, not hours worked, not productivity. It is this: your parents' income. This directly contradicts the (popular) view that we live in a meritocracy where all you have to do to succeed is work hard and be smart and apply yourself.
> What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day.
Mind sharing the study of workplace absenteeism that you're basing that opinion on?
I correlated lack of punctuality with overrepresentation in low-wage+low-skill jobs.
There are also plenty of high-social status, skilled, low-income jobs that are thoroughly dominated by the upper classes, like college professors, journalists, rank & file media/fashion, and orchestra musicians. Those jobs are not low-skill and people in them tend to show up to work.
Skill 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.
This 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?
What an extremely elitist phrase.