All labor is skilled labor.
Not when I’m doing it!
💀
I got the joke, but I definitely see why others may have missed it
What kind of fucked up centaur is this?
It’s not a centaur, it’s a leftaur.
Guys desperate to put himself above another, with the delusion of throwing shit in a box being skilled labor, instead of standing in solidarity with the mcdonalds worker and demanding more for both of them
If he thinks packing boxes is skilled labor, then flipping burgers is also skilled labor.
It’s just not specialized, and doesn’t require any certification or further education. Which would command the premium he’s thinking of.
All labor is skilled labor. Can you think of any job that doesn’t require learning some sort of skill(s)? It’s just an arbitrary designation intended to justify low wages.
I’m highly educated but you couldn’t just stick me into a traditionally “unskilled” roles for which I have neither experience nor training and expect me to function. I’d crash and burn because jobs require the development and utilization of… wait for it…skills.
Some labor is inherently more skilled than other. I can train you in a day to flip burgers. You’ll be better in a month than you are on day one, but you don’t need hands on training after that first day.
I can’t train you in a month to operate a break press. And in my plant that’s the least skilled job.
I get that all jobs require some skill, I’m not disputing that. But when we’re talking about skilled labor, were talking about those jobs that require significant investment in time to learn, often requiring the laborer to seek that education on their own before even being considered for a job.
I’ve always assumed skilled labor referred to like, electricians and plumbers. Tradesmen kind of positions, the stuff you have to apprentice for. So if you’re a really good plumber or whatever, you can demand a premium on top of whatever your trade normally allows. Whereas this dude could be the best box packer in all of the Amazon warehouses and should never expect a cent more than any of his coworkers, because the job only takes like a week to train for.
In the past, the privileged would be mocked for their lack of capacities in practical activities.
These days, the myth of the meritocracy compels the unprivileged to identify with the values of those by whom they are devalued.
While that’s true, it’s much easier to get someone with formal higher education to learn how to operate a cash register than to get someone without education to operate industrial equipment. In other words, we need more and better formal education for everyone.
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I don’t think dude knows what “skilled labor” means.
Seriously. It takes more skill to prepare food than to pack a box.
I think he’s referring to the standard Amazon packer assortment of skills: pissing in a bottle, hiding workplace injuries, sleeping in your car, etc.
You might upset him if you try to taint the good name of the company.
TIL packing boxes is skilled labor
Everything is skilled labour. For 99% of jobs you couldn’t roll up and be proficient at it without training or practice.
But correct me if I am wrong, but in my country skilled labor means you have to have a relevant formal education to qualify for the job, (in addition to getting training on the job which is inevitable).
You are correct.
Yes, all jobs take skill. Unskilled jobs usually mean jobs that require no prior training or experience. They will train you and you will get experience there.
They’re jobs for, currently, unskilled workers. Or at least, workers that do not have a skill they can transfer over to the workforce.
Phrasing means whatever the powerful groups who promulgate the phrasing establish that it should mean.
Yeah, but not all jobs offer training on-site.
If you’re an unskilled worker, you’re only eligible for unskilled positions, i.e. ones that don’t require outside training.
Came to say this. It’s hard labor, sure, but it’s probably the least skilled job there is.
Since when is packing boxes a skilled labor?
I think that’s the joke
Everything’s a skilled Labor job if you use your imagination hard enough.
It does get easier, though.
I rather a dude handling my food get paid better than someone touching cardboard.
No balls ony food is preferred over no balls on my Amazon packages.
I think (choose to believe) the original tweet is satire.
Who wants to tell him?
That McDonald’s takes more skill than boxes?
Different kinds of labor take different skills, not more or less, better or worse.
Some skills do take more time to learn. And sometimes, the job is safety relevant, meaning that it could cause harm to property and/or life if done poorly. If I was told that the guy who flips burgers at McDonalds had 1 month of training, I’d not be concerned. But if I was told that the surgeon about to operate on me had one month of training, I’d be freaking out.
Has anyone ever told you that you might receive an operation by a surgeon who had trained for only one month?
Is the hypothetical threat captured in your scenario relevant, credible, or realistic in relation to the particular distinctions from the context?
They were just demonstrating that the labor of the surgeon does actually require more skill. Because it does, objectively.
In this case it was a straw man argument.
A straw man fallacy is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
The conversation was about how all labor is skilled labor, then you brought up an entirely audacious hyperbole about a specific career field and argued against your own example. Yes, surgeons need more training than a burger flipper, and yes, they deserve apt compensation for that disparity in time and expertise, but that does not mean that the burger flipper is “unskilled” or that the surgeon would be any more capable of flipping burgers because of their training to be a surgeon. Your “demonstration” was irrelevant to the topic at hand and constituted a bad faith argument. That is what you were being called out on, not the content of the argument itself.
In this case it was a straw man argument.
Let’s take a look at the original thesis from @unfreeradical, shall we:
Different kinds of labor take different skills, not more or less, better or worse.
I consider ‘skill’ to be measurable by the amount of time needed to acquire it. You can take somebody fresh out of high school, and turn him into a competent fry cook in a month, but not into a competent surgeon. Hence the surgeon requires both more skill, as well as different skills. Therefore the surgeon/fry-cook example is a counterexample to the thesis, and thus disproves the thesis.
but that does not mean that the burger flipper is “unskilled”
I never said that burger flippers are unskilled, or that they need no training, just that 1 month is enough to learn how to do it. So, basically you’re misrepresenting my argument to claim I’ve used a straw man argument.
No. They said that labor did not require more or less skill. They did not say that all labor is skilled labor. You, ironically, are fighting the straw man.
Some skills surely are less common within some population, and some may require more training above the skill sets generally shared within a society.
No one is suggesting receiving surgery from an uncredentialed surgeon.
Are such observations broadly relevant or valuable, though, within the context?
You said that different labor does not take more or less skill. Perhaps you were trying to make a different point that you are now trying to tease out socraticly.
Do you think making false statements is a valuable approach? Do you think a job requiring less skill is a bad thing or that it should be respected any less than one that does?
Are such observations broadly relevant or valuable, though, within the context?
Yes. Skill can be measured by the time needed to attain it. Since the skills needed by a surgeon take years to acquire, the surgeon requires more skill than the fry cook. This is a counterexample to your thesis. And by being a counterexample to your thesis, it is relevant and/or valuable. Unless of course, your thesis were to be considered irrelevant and worthless.
With the term ‘training’ I mean all job relevant education. As in, a surgeon whose entire medical education happened within 1 month, not a surgeon who graduated med school and then was trained for 1 month as a surgeon.
Is the hypothetical threat captured in your scenario relevant, credible, or realistic in relation to the particular distinctions from the context?
Yes, it illustrates that for some tasks, training is more essential than for other tasks. Also, why are you asking that?
You know medical training is on the job hands on and every doctor is expected statistically to kill someone, not simply not save someone but actively lead to their death in one way or another.
🐈 They do spend years in med school before they are allowed to kill a patient, though.
And yet, they are not only more skilled than someone who is not a doctor, but also more so than their younger self. It’s almost as if one can garner more skill through experience.
The issue relates to whether various kinds of skill express a natural ranking .
Has any suggestion genuinely produced, as a credible concern, the scenario you described, or was it rather constructed as a bogeyman that would obstruct even criticism that is substantive and germane?
Unqualified workers in safety relevant professions causing damages or even loss of life has happened.
Except some skills are much harder to learn and some skills are much more valuable to society than others. I would argue the hard to learn, more valuable to society ones are “better”. I don’t think the people performing them are better or worse, but it’s fair to elevate and celebrate certain jobs over others.
Some skills are associated with greater barrier to acquisition, or are considered as higher in social value, but both attributes are inherently nebulous and overall unquantifiable.
Characterizing certain skills as better, though, based on such comparisons, even if, for the sake or argument, the validity of such comparisons were conceded, is simply a subjective appeal without any meaning deeper than personal preference or bald assertion.
Within the current system of labor organization, by which labor is commodified within the relations between worker and business, labor is valorized not by value to society, with every member of society participating equally in resolving a value for each kind of labor, but rather by the value of workers’ labor toward business interests captured beneath the profit motive, that is, value expressly to the owners of business.
My man, this is not an argument for or against capitalism.
If two skills are of relatively close societal value, and one is harder to do, learn and master, that craft deserves more respect.
This is not a reflection of any individual.
Society is not uniform or monolithic. Society has structure, including various relations based on interests that may be shared or antagonist.
Social value is not intrinsic to skill, nor to any other target of valorization, but rather determined from processes of valorization bound to the surrounding social systems.
It is unequivocal that our society valorizes labor not for benefit shared generally across the public, but specifically for its value to private business.
It is also questionable that a skill itself may carry a demand for respect that is separable from respect as understood by having a personal target.
You sound like a drunk person at a party arguing with the wall.
Yeah, I’m an engineer. I’ve been a server, and I’ve washed dishes. I could go back to doing either of those, your average dishwasher could do neither of the others.
Some skills may be more common than others, but their distribution throughout the population is not the same as their occurrence within any natural ranking relative one to another.
What? What is the natural distribution of aeronautics engineers?
There is no natural distribution of any social role. A distribution is determined socially.
Further, I already addressed your conflation of occurrence within a population for a skill versus its intrinsic attributes.
You don’t think social forces are natural?
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Idk what takes more skills, but I sure as hell know that you won’t catch me dealing with fast food customers ever no matter how much you pay me
Dealing with abusive customers surely is a skill lacked by many workers generally, and thankfully not needed or even useful for many labor roles.
While I see your point that all labor has value, skills can be significantly more or less involved to learn and master. There are labor jobs that require certification or ongoing licensure to perform and those that do not. There are roles that involve the health and safety of others and those that do not.
I think the skills involved between fast food and warehouse packing are probably pretty comparable overall, but a blanket statement of “all labor is equal” really doesn’t hold true.
It was not implied that all labor is equal.
Much to the contrary, every kind of labor is qualitatively different from another, and bound to skill that is qualitatively different from other skill.
Several other contributors to the discussion have conflated various measures related to investment for acquiring a particular skill, with the skill itself.
Skill is not a quantity, nor may it be quantified, nor emerges a natural ranking for skill of various kinds.
Yes a ranking for skill emerges. It emerges from the scarcity and need for that skill. If a skill takes decades to master, there will likely be an inherent scarcity of masters. Those masters are obviously more revered and rewarded, and they should be. If a dunce in only capable of putting things in boxes, something that literally anyone, as well as some animals can do, then they are relatively worthless.
I already addressed your conflation of occurrence within a population for a skill versus its intrinsic attributes, in response to your previous comment.
This is the American way though isn’t it? Push downward instead of moving upward. If flipping burgers is easier than packing boxes, and makes you the same money, why not quit at Amazon and start flipping burgers at McDonald’s?
The idea is that apparently it is not necessarily easier to flip burgers, but it requires less skill and training/education than picking items from warehouse shelves and putting them in a cardboard box.
I’ve never worked in a warehouse, but I’d assume there’s no significant difference between the two tasks when it comes to education or training. I’d be pretty pissed off if the guys at McDonald’s were paid the same as me, but I’ve spent years at university and accumulated some debt along the way.
Having done both, this is pots & kettles being pissed at each other for boiling water. Flipping burgers and packing boxes are both trivially easy on their face, and the hard parts of both jobs are accuracy, speed, and figuring out how to get your job done when your capitalist overlords have erased your support staff and passed their jobs on to you.
It’s really easy to flip burgers. It’s fucking hard to take orders, flip burgers, make drinks, and keep the fryer rolling by yourself while also doing freezer pulls to keep everything running.
It’s really easy to throw shit in boxes. It’s fucking hard to throw shit in boxes when you’ve been standing for 10 hours on your day off because of mandatory overtime, none of your equipment is maintained, none of the shit you’re supposed to be packing is where it belongs, and your management who are supposed to make sure that shit gets taken care of are busy sexually assaulting the 18 year old new hires.
Everybody’s jobs suck and corporate skeleton crews are making it worse. The average $15/hr worker in 2023 is doing 3 to 4 workers jobs from 2019. Eat the rich, Unionize, etc…
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Pissed at who, is the question
Pissed at “what”. The system.
Pissed at whoever have the least power and are the most harmed by the system.
Why not?
ship it.
I’d be pretty pissed off if the guys at McDonald’s were paid the same as me, but I’ve spent years at university and accumulated some debt along the way.
But for some reason nobody gets pissed when someone whose whole actual job was to fall out of the right va jay jay and directly into the ivy leagues gets paid much more (100x in most cases) what they do to blabber on phone calls about market share or whatever.
McDonald’s workers aren’t the problem at all and nothing about the labor market changes substantially by them being able to afford diapers.
We have wealth hording dragons in this country ruining the whole thing with their wrath and greed and yet everyone’s pissed that some serf got an extra ball of cheese this week.
The tasks are quite different, and so is the training.
Each skill is different, not higher or lower, or greater or lesser, than another.
I agree.
I don’t see anyone arguing for this here.
Why not punch upward, to help fight the powers that punch down on everyone from their heights?
Packing boxes is not skilled labor.
There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. I guarantee you that dude is better than you are at packing boxes. That’s known as “skill”
If you can master it in a week it isn’t a skill. You are redefining the word to make it so broad it is useless to make some ideological point. Also given what I see with Amazon boxes I doubt they can in fact pack better than I can.
That would require lasting a week at Amazon. Anyone who does that is indisputably skilled.
You are describing someone acquiring skills over the course of a week.
An assessment as you have given would depend on, as a basis, the general skills already prevalent within a target population.
Also, it is questionable that someone would not continue to develop skill through practicing a task longer than a week.
Your invocation of a judgment is essentially vacuous, as you have done with the word “master”.
Jesus who are you trying to impress talking like that? Putting shit in a box is not skilled labor in the sense being a plumber or an accountant is. Just because I can’t define the line exactly does not mean there is no line and pointing out that my reasoning isn’t perfect doesn’t make your reasoning correct.
It is unskilled labor because words are defined by consensus.
The line is imaginary, and division by any line is not particularly natural or useful.
What consensus are you imagining? I cannot recall being asked to offer an opinion for any consensus.
Who participated in constructing the consensus? What processes are generally available to challenge the entrenched consensus, or to direct the development of a new consensus?
Which groups have supported such a consensus more strongly than others?
Bullshit lines don’t matter. You clearly act like it does. Do you eat anything randomly or do you have standards of hygiene and taste and nutrition?
Yeah you weren’t consulted. Your whims don’t outrule billions of people who refuse to be ordered to believe that 2 + 2 = 5.
Still goalposting moving, which is also unskilled labor.
You asserted a consensus had been formed.
Who participated in forming the consensus?
Did you participate? Are you benefiting from such a consensus? Would you be harmed by its being replaced?
Why is your tone so protective and forceful?
Skilled labor is something that you need outside training in order to do.
When someone is an ‘unskilled worker,’ it means they’re only eligible for positions that train them.
Name one thing that doesn’t require outside skill. Literally nothing you know in your life you learned on your own.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just what people intend to mean when they say unskilled labor.
The “people” who intend to mean that I shouldn’t even be paid aren’t people.
I have a master’s degree, but I can honestly say working at Wendy’s took just as much skill as what I do now. “People” who use terms like “unskilled labor” are part of the problem. There’s no such thing as “unskilled labor.” I’m agreeing with you.
I only have a bachelor’s degree and can honestly say that there is no way I can do my job without it.
It is not about compensation. If the work is unskilled it is unskilled. How much it should be paid is a different discussion.
The people who invented the term invented it to justify low or no pay
I can’t fathom cognitive dissonance of being able to say unskilled and implying it isn’t equivalent to $0
Packing boxes, unless you mean “outside training” to include walking and talking
It’s unskilled in terms that any moderately competent person can do the job and become proficient at it quickly
My skilled job required tertiary education, plus about two years on the job for a person to become good at it
Nevertheless, a worker who has been trained is a worker who has become skilled.
A worker who has been trained on a job site is worker who has become skilled in work at the job site.
When one has spent half a day learning to pack boxes, then a week learning to do it quick enough, I’ll grant they have acquired a skill. Probably not a transferable skill, but definitely a skill
It’s still unskilled work
There is definitely such a thing as jobs that take lots of book learning and tests to get, and jobs anyone can get by applying for them. This semantic fight of “No such thing as unskilled labor” is just going to make people call it something new and politically correct, but it won’t change reality.
It’s not semantics, it’s just refusing to use an inaccurate name. Just because anyone can get a job doesn’t mean anyone can excel at it. Why are you suggesting we should all consent to the lie that unskilled labor exists?
Which are the people who are dominating culture and language, who carry the power to fulfill your prediction?
How do such distinctions and constructs originally emerge, and why do they remain entrenched?
Goalpost moving. You can’t defend the redefining of the word so you attack the people who did define it.
Straw man attack.
Ad-hominem appeal to motive.
I have not advocated for a definition being imposed.
I have encouraged critical inquiry over the emergence and entrenchment of terms and constructs.
You don’t know what those terms mean.
Go encourage the next person who makes the mistake of being polite to you.
You have not been in fact particularly kind or charitable.
Nevertheless, please advise me over which terms I misused.
I will accept any correction that can be validated.
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Which is why everyone is an engineer these days. Guy with a mop? Sanitation engineer. Guy who sells stuff all day? Sales engineer. Help desk? No, systems engineer.
Title inflation isnt a big deal but it is silly.
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This commenter’s never had top score on Tetris
The only, truly, skilled labor.
Have you ever received an Amazon package? They are not masters of Tetris
Seems a lot of the comments are focused on debating the word ‘skill’ applied to each job while another capitalist gets off free while infighting amongst people who should be supporting each other in a shit world that capitalism built and benefits off of.
Enshitification is where there’s a CEO somewhere that fucks everyone over and remains untouched.
That person really should be the focus of hate here.
Enshitification is where there’s a CEO somewhere that fucks everyone…
That person really should be the focus of hate here.
Speaking of which, why is some waged labor characterized as “skilled”, and other not?
How has such a construct become entrenched, and in what context has it been utilized?
Seems to me like “skilled labor” is some job that cannot be quickly and easily learned by new workers. (Build me a shed is a little less intuitive than grill me a hamburger)
Is there value in characterizing certain kinds of labor as “unskilled”, and if so, who realizes the value, and who imposes the distinction?
Some jobs need education to do and certain qualifications to know overall what needs to be done and when . Either way getting mad at someone for not having the same qualifications but getting paid a living wage is not an ethical basis for a grudge. And the most unethical person in the mix is ignored.
All jobs may be described as you have done.
Again, who imposes such distinctions, and who benefits from such distinctions being imposed?
Sounds like you already know the answer to the questions your asking.
Some have considered such questions more carefully than others.
I am only suggesting everyone consider them personally, before anchoring to any strong opinions.
So long as you get hung up on the catch phrases, those will be the easiest goal posts that get switched.
Just watch, tomorrow it’ll be defined by ‘how much more dangerous’ a job is to create the same infighting rift.
I am only adding that it may be worth considering how particular catch phrases are utilized and become entrenched.
Maybe it should be considered that the amazon worker in the picture would be able to go to his boss and say ‘I could go flip burgers at McDonalds for the same as what you pay me, I want a rise’.
They should absolutely take it upon themselves to go to their boss for their rise. Would be even better if they back off attacking someone who flips burgers and is allowed a living wage to do so. It is unnecessary to kick down.
I’ve never worked in fast food but I’ve been to them and I’ve watched the workers. You can’t tell me packing boxes at Amazon is skilled labor and that shit isn’t.
I’m so over the use of “checks notes” for emphasis. for every entertaining way of making commentary there are thousands of boring copies.
It doesn’t even make sense to say it in this context. They don’t understand what it means at all, they just mindlessly spouted it off like a robot.
🗒️🗒️
I like how everyone is upset with the “skilled work” part. But nobody did the calculation, that with Bezos pay and 16 dollars per hour, you could hire 562500 Workers. Which I think is crazy
But Bezos’ earnings are in addition to what Amazon uses for personnel expenditures, so that’s not instead of, it’s in addition to the number of people Amazon already can and does employ. Something like ~1.5 million employees, though that includes higher paid employees as well as the warehouse and delivery personnel.
I think the relevance of the observation relates to how the business’s income is distributed among all those receiving some share.
You can hire way more than that, people don’t work 24/7, but I assume Bezos’ income in this post isn’t based on a peasant workweek.
That is actually pretty nuts.
Imagine having half a million people working under you, and you don’t even need them to turn a profit.
Leave first world nations, and you become a god. Not sure why more billionaires don’t do that.
It’s much less than that with benefits and taxes but still probably 200k+
Brother how you gonna diss on spongebob like this?
Right? I’ve seen my dude straight sling them crab pats out the window with gusto. Mf even came in talking about how ready he was. Unstoppable.
