Lower vs middle class maybe sure, there is discussion there. Skilled vs unskilled labor: you don’t know how to read even Wikipedia. It has nothing to do with skill (you can watch a guy dice an onion in his hand in 4.2 seconds and it’s still “unskilled labor”) and everything to do with choosing the right vocabulary to express a point: some jobs require college or trade school and some do not.
All skilled labor is compressed unskilled labor, or in other words, all unskilled labor is skilled labor.
Training and raising someone to do a job contributes to the value produced by their labor, it matters more in comparison to the aggregate whole than anything else.
I don’t know how to respond to this? I mean yes you are right but the compression is not situation agnostic which is the whole point: some jobs (“skilled labor”) require a particular degree or pretraining as a point of entry, and others (“unskilled labor”) do not. It doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or not worth pursuing, but it’s a mincing of words that are poorly chosen in the first place.
At the end of the day yes both varieties are worth pursuing and are necessary but one has a zero knowledge entry point and the other does not. I don’t agree with “skilled vs unskilled” as vocab goes, but this is the point.
My point is that the idea of “unskilled labor” is false, if skilled labor is labor that requires training, then all labor is skilled labor of a different manner, and as such all labor is labor, even if some labor is more or less constrained.
2x vs 3x doesn’t mean x changes.
A line chef isn’t considered an unskilled laborer. Unskilled labor is like flipping burgers, digging ditches, and that sort of thing.
Unskilled labor is a bullshit term used to diminish the work done by people in low paying jobs. Many people would say that a line cook is unskilled, slightly above flipping burgers or digging ditches. It’s nebulous and useless for productive conversation
No you’ve missed the point. It has nothing at all to do with value or pay scale as you can easily see by comparing a B.S. grad in engineering with a trained plumber who will definitely make more money. All “unskilled” means is that you didn’t go to school to start. Period. It doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or doesn’t require skill, it means whoever started the discussion picked shitty words.
No youre conflating how you define the word “skill” with the actual definition. It’s absolutely unfortunate but just means you didn’t go to school to get the job.
There are plenty of jobs that don’t require a college degree but require a lot of skills. Would you consider an electrician to be unskilled labor? I don’t know anyone who would. But if you can perform all the duties of your job after some simple instructions then that’s usually considered unskilled labor.
