“Unskilled” and “requiring no previous qualificatuons” aren’t the same thing. Even “unskilled” labor can have many qualifications, even if most people would meet said qualifications. Hell, some people even don’t meet the qualifications for McDonalds for various reasons that are unrelated to skill. And similarly labor that requires no previous qualifications can still be labelled “unskilled”.
The difference here is that you can go into McDonald’s and learn on the job with little to no difficulty in the process.
“Patties are found in the freezer here. Go into the freezer, grab a box, put it here, take out and put 9 on the grill, grab these salt & pepper shakers and shake once overtop and then press this button; once it beeps it’s done and you throw them all into this warmer here.” Jobs been mainly taught and you can rock that for a whole shift.
OP is using McDonald’s as it’s pretty universal to know the basics of life on that part. Like how to press a button, what a freezer is, how to carry something and how to move objects without ruining things.
Go ahead and try to teach someone how to be a doctor/dentist with the same common knowledge. Or how to get someone to program an application when they only know how to turn on an iPad and open an app.
Difficulty is subjective. Like yeah, to me and most people the jobs labelled “unskilled labour” are going to be easy and being a doctor or dentist is going to be hard, nobody’s arguin that. But it gets a lot fuzzier when you start getting into seemingly low-skilled jobs which are put at higher value and labelled “skilled labor”, and seemingly high-skilled jobs which are put at lower value and labelled “unskilled labor”. This is especially apparent with manual labor (including some trades).
Plus it completely ignores the fact that things that are hard to one person can come extremely easily to another, and vice versa. Not every fast food employee can be a lawyer, but not every lawyer can be a fast food employee. Surprisingly, employers for “low-skill” jobs can be very picky with employees. And there exists extremely low-skill lawyers just like there exist extremely low-skill fast food employees. Same with teachers. The only difference in this case is that being a lawyer requires you to pay tens to hundreds of thousands for a degree, so the barrier for entry is artificially higher for poorer people.
Right now the case is mostly just that jobs considered low-value by society are called “unskilled labor” while jobs considered high-value by society are called “skilled labor” despite not being higher in actual skill used or required. Even disregarding manual labor, I wouldn’t consider my office job particularly high skill, it has a low barrier to entry and anyone could reasonably get a similar position with very little time investment, but it’s lumped into “skilled labor” just because it pays a lot and people don’t view it with a stigma like they do with low-paying jobs. Hell a lot of middle managers know absolutely nothing about the job of the people they manage, but they get labelled as “skilled laborers” anyways.
Difficulty has nothing to do do with skilled or unskilled labor. Skilled labor is labor that requires formal training and/or significant experience, unskilled labor usually entails on the job training that lasts less than a week.
What are the high skilled jobs that are labeled unskilled labor?