Or save a Word doc as pdf.
I work in academia. I’m a lowly paid adjunct who teaches 8 classes across 4 schools to make ends meet.
In the lead up to this semester, each school has had a mandatory Zoom meeting to get everyone involved on the same page.
In all 4 instances, I sat there and fucking seethed watching people who make upward of 10 times what I do just endlessly fumble with the technology while saying nothing of value for 2 hours.
It’s honestly amazing just how inept the manager class is.
Calling any labor unskilled is fraternizing with the weapons of the enemy, we don’t need it. Our greatest weapon is class consciousness and worker solidarity.
It never made sense to me. You spent 1 hour of your 24 hours a day doing something you would not do for fun. Your 1 hour is just as long as my 1 hour. Both of us sacrifice the same amount of free time out of our lives doing something we’d rather not do. Why should we be paid differently?
If anything, the higher ranking the job, the more it allows for chatting with colleagues, going out for lunch, taking coffee breaks. You get much more “fun time” than labor intense workers do. Shouldn’t you be paid less? There is an added benefit in your job to begin with. The luxury of being able to sit and get coffee when you want to is already quite a blast tbh.
deleted by creator
In my experience only 20% of baristas are in fact skilled.
If 80% of the baristas were on paid leave for severe burns I don’t think those companies would still be open.
Retail and hospitality workers have to have a number of skill sets just to keep from being fired day 1.
The number of people who refuse/can’t work a POS system and complain that people who can are unskilled is always a comical thing.
Most anyone I’ve met who calls any job unskilled is an idiot who thinks to highly of themselves.
Then again many people think support positions aren’t as important, and I tend to believe every position is a support position. Doctors support construction workers who support lawyers who support baristas who support salespeople who support hospitality who support entertainment who support plumbers who support IT members who support accountants who support banks who supports…
There is no such thing as unskilled work
How could you say that? This is landlord erasure
I believe they prefer to be called “persons of land”. /s
if only
That’s not work.
You’re right. It goes beyond work. It’s a service to humanity.
I have been in an argument with a landlord before. They were arguing that it was a real job because of all the paperwork. I was just like… bruh
Paperwork is only a job if you’re a lawyer or an accountant.
Everytime unskilled work is mentioned, someone feels the need to comment that ackchually all work requires skill.
Unskilled work means you don’t need prior experience or specific education to apply. You will be trained on the job.
That’s not true though. I am a skilled machine operator, and I was hired with zero experience and trained on the job because there just aren’t enough trained operators locally available in my industry.
Ah … It might mean that, but for many rich bosses it means “a job that pays less” and that’s all.
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.
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.
So installing HVAC systems is unskilled work? I didn’t have any prior experience or education when I got a job doing that.
And you were able to work on your own with less than a weeks worth of OJT?
Actually it was about a week and it was other apprentices that did the majority of the training.
And framing labor this way totally disregars the time commitment. Which should be a thriving wage for any hob that requires 40hrs/week
I think the spelling in this reply actually tells the story
Disappointed in your lack of punctuation. It really speaks to your absence of moral character.
Hey now, don’t buy management long
Well, there’s Amazon packing, where they recently sent me three cards in an A3 by 4" box. Ain’t no way you could call that “skilled”.
Who is complaining about unskilled workers?
Anyone who doesn’t think they should get a decent wage.
Who is thinking that people shouldn’t get a decent wage?
The people who get the money instead.
Which is who?
Farmers. Farmers can make a lot of money, they hire “unskilled” immigrants to harvest crops and shit like that (often if not usually illegal immigrants) and “underpay” them. It’s a complicated situation that people usually look down on but everyone benefits in some way. Is it fair that a legal US citizen would be paid more for the same work? Not really because the same employee costs a lot more to employ, and some of that wage pays into the system whereas people paid under the table do not.
Usually executives.
Thinking about it makes the argument really really poor. If I’m a construction worker who spent decades perfecting my skills so I get promoted to management, now I have to hire someone else to take my previous position. The whole point of paying someone to do something should be because your time is better spent doing something else. So a very skilled person SHOULD be paying someone to get coffee. So the whole concept falls apart.
This is actually correct. I will say that these higher-ups are unreasonably dumb though. I work with a lot of them. It’s like they traded low IQ skills like wiping their ass with “high IQ” skills like being marketed to and going to conventions to find out how to generate synergy.
This is based on the fallacy that people deserve to be rich because they are more skilled and work harder. In most cases this is not true. Most just use money to make more money. They don’t actually produce anything useful for humanity.
I agree with your point that not all rich people deserve or have earned it but I think most people have, just based on personal experience and attention to this detail.
Look at the number of CEOs in the US it’s actually a pretty low number, I think <300K. Most people around and below CEO will need to compete in some way and most people serving coffee actually wouldn’t want to be competing in these positions anyway.
I recently thought, if we paid people based on a persons importance in society so many things would be turned upside down. Example, day care workers are very important to a childs well being and education and are paid so little. If you paid them much better it would create incentives and competition for those positions. The smarter more driven people who would not have considered the position at such a low wage would be drawn in and as a result the quality of education would improve. That same dynamic applied anywhere else would have the same effect.
Without an enforced rule like this, people who “deserve” more money might take jobs that don’t pay well, think education or research. You end up with open positions around CEOs, upper and middle management, that need to be filled that don’t require skills as much as say availability and experience doing specific things like scheduling.
I say all of this as a boots-on-the-ground senior engineer who refuses to take a management role, could make more money by doing less and have people being me coffee.
You understand that is a skill in and of itself. Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt. To be able to actually consistently make money off of money isn’t magical, it doesn’t happen automatically. If it did everyone would be far wealthier.
Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt.
Well yeah, so do most of the gamblers, but some miraculously don’t, but we don’t believe that playing rouletts is a skill now. Incidentally, moat of the people who consistently gamble but don’t go bankrupt are people who have more money than it’s possible to lose in one sitting.
Playing stonks follows exactly the same logic.Actually you make a great point. Which is why there’s professional poker, where gamblers can literally make a living. Understanding the difference between being a professional and being able to consistently make money and where to go to do it, is part of the skill I’m talking about. Thanks!
Not understanding the difference between the game of skill and the game of chance is exactly the grasp on reality that I expected from you based on this thread.
No, your not understanding that games of skill or chance are both gambling. Being able to identify the difference makes you a gambler who can live off his gambling or one who will go broke. Same trick in investing.
That’s definitionally not what the word means. But you probably believe that you can predict the streaks in slot machines so I am pretty sure I’m wasting my time here
To be able to actually consistently make money off of money isn’t magical, it doesn’t happen automatically
Ever heard of interest? Savings accounts?
Say you just have 100 million sitting in a bank account. The average national savings account interest rate (and you’d get a much better one with 100 million) is 0.42 APY.
So you’d get $420,000 in interest every year.
If it did everyone would be far wealthier.
No, the rich would be richer. It’s expensive to make money, but very simple if you have a lot of it. Those without the capacity will keep getting poorer. You can shift the margins by taking more risks, obviously, but you can just make moneys for free when you already have enough for everything you need.
And hmm how is the trend going?
Oh, right.
The average national savings account interest rate (and you’d get a much better one with 100 million) is 0.42 APY.
Treasury Notes are 10x that rate. This mostly just illustrates how scammy and cheap your average bank has grown.
Yeah, my point here being that even with the puniest of interest rates, you’d still make more than enough just off the interest to live somewhat comfortably. And in reality, you’d make millions and you’d have so much you could risk a little of it while still having those safe investments yielding all the time.
even with the puniest of interest rates, you’d still make more than enough just off the interest to live somewhat comfortably
I’d go one step further and assert that wealth compounds and borrowing rates fall with your aggregate wealth. Treasuries are the safest of safe bets, but there are much higher returns to be had with some minimal risk that become accessible when you have large cash reserves and access to cheap credit. Home ownership is a classic example. Save thousands of dollars a year on rent by owning an appreciating asset you get to live in.
You don’t need $100M to make this work. $100k can turn a handsome profit through compound returns on investment. In a stock market that yields 7%/year, you double your money in a decade.
Let me start borrowing at the Prime Rate and the sky is the limit. I can take out a loan for 4.3% and invest in an index fund like the S&P that has returned 12.9% APY over the last 10 years. When I’m cleaning up 8.6% on my borrowed money, what’s the right number of dollars to borrow? Every dollar I can get my hands on.
Well, thanks for far improving my point with superior elucidation of how it would be actually done.
I thought home ownership as well, but then I thought he’d start complaining about house markets and insurance and whatnot. But we know that realistically it would be beyond easy to make 100 million grow.
thanks again
Sure they increased their money during the pandemic. People were acting like idiots buying homes and goods when they really really shouldn’t have. It’s also true the rich prey on this. Go try to get 100 million in an interest bank account and see what happens, it’s actually harder to leave that kind of money in interest accounts because of how FINRA regulations work. Your money would literally not be insured. You wouldn’t know these things because you just hear other poor people talk about the rich and not the actual rich.
Thus, the real crux of the problem. The poor don’t even understand well enough what’s happening to make a good argument. Between the wanna be rich poor people who talk about unskilled labor as if you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the poor who hate the rich, no one actually understands how it all works. And it all WORKS BECAUSE you don’t understand. If the poor didn’t respond the way they did during the pandemic, the rich wouldn’t have been able to hoover up all their money. Who’s taking the 22% loans, who’s buying houses they can’t afford on 30+ year mortgages at 8%. All of those actions make the rich richer. You want to stop the rich? Stop wasting your money. But even if you can, the rest won’t and the money will keep funneling up. Thus the real problem. But no one wants to change their life style. Instead they’ll go out and buy expensive handbags and other luxury items on lay away. You can’t stop the rich as long as everyone participates in capitalism.
A lot of words for saying “you’re right that one can very safely invest that kind of money and thus I was wrong in saying money doesn’t just generate money, when it very literally does”.
“I pointed a gun at a guy and asked to fuck him in the arse and he just seemed to agree without question. That doesn’t make me a rapist, it makes him a slut.”
Honestly I couldn’t come up with more hilarious victim blaming if I tried. 5/5 for trolling as a deeply brainwashed libertarian fucknut.
The problem is there is no safe way to invest that kind of money. If there was a purely safe way to invest everyone would be a millionaire. The savings account thing you mentioned is literally only for poor people, to give them a leg up and a small increasing investment for the purpose of teaching people the value of investment. You’ve created a strawman and keep smacking it.
If there was a purely safe way to invest everyone would be a millionaire.
No, they wouldn’t, because investing requires you to have something to invest.
I don’t understand why youre fighting against very obvious facts. Money makes money.
Quite literally. You’re pretending as if it wouldn’t be safe slopping 100 mil into a Swiss bank account, given you’re not American and that 100 million was rightfully yours.
“You’ve created a strawman”. No need, honestly. Your trying to argue that it’s not incredibly easy to generate passive income for life if had a 100 million to invest.
That’s just patently untrue.
deleted by creator
I genuinely do not understand what your talking about. Elaborate?
My bad I was on mobile that was meant for another and I just clicked the wrong reply from notifications. Whops
Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt.
Bankruptcy is a tool for discharging debt, not a metric for business failure.
You don’t bother declaring bankruptcy unless you have creditors. If you’re an unsuccessful day trader, nobody is lending you much money to begin with.
You’re missing the point. I don’t think most people have a problem saying there are different levels of skill based employment. Does designing a skyscraper take more skill than managing the lunch rush at a McDonald’s? Probably, but by saying working in fast food is an unskilled trade is propaganda to keep wages for those jobs low.
There is a definite skill for handling noon at a McDonald’s. Maybe it’s different than doing high level math for engineering but it’s not unskilled.
That’s where the issue is for most people that don’t like the punching down at “unskilled workers”
This is the same argument I have with my parents when they say that “unskilled workers” have jobs and not careers. And they use that as a justification for not paying them a living wage, “it’s not supposed to be a job forever” is usually the answer I get.
If you contribute 40 hours of labor to the country’s GDP, you should expect to be able to have shelter, food and medical care. That’s not asking a lot.
Creating a class of full time employees below that basic level is disgusting.
Does designing a skyscraper take more skill than managing the lunch rush at a McDonald’s?
I feel like it’d honestly be hard to compare, because it’s such a vastly different skillset/task.
It’s like the differences between writing a technical manual and wrangling a clowder of cats on crack.
With enough education, care and time, anyone could probably achieve the first (even if you suck at it, you can just do it again until it’s acceptable, there’s no rush), but even attempting the second takes a certain…je ne sais quoi.
If you contribute 40 hours of labor to the country’s GDP, you should expect to be able to have shelter, food and medical care. That’s not asking a lot.
That’s 1000% true, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are jobs you can do from walking in off the street with an hour or two of training, and there are jobs that you need more training/background/skills to do.
All full time work should provide enough for a basic standard of living. But arguing that there isn’t a difference in required skill between stocking shelves in an Amazon warehouse and say, diagnosing and treating cancer is absurd.
That’s going to significantly undermine your argument with a lot of people.
As far as your parents go, historically a lot of those jobs were populated primarily by high school students or people trying to make some side cash, and it wasn’t as hard to find employment in a more stable “career” job. The economy worked in a way where having dead end “starter” jobs still “worked”.
They just probably aren’t as aware of the fact that more and more people are getting stuck in those jobs due to no fault of their own. The idea is truly and utterly alien to them if they haven’t had to navigate job hunting since they started their “career” job.
The idea that people who didn’t make poor life choices are trying to survive off working at McDonalds doesn’t mesh with their understanding of how the world works. The idea that someone working at Walmart full time can’t afford to live without government assistance doesn’t seem real.
The last time they had to directly deal with that sort of stuff, no one was trying to survive that way because you could much more easily move to a job you could survive on if you just put in a small amount of effort. It might have been another shitty job, but options were there if you just looked. Not too long ago you could survive off Walmart.
All you can really do is to keep insisting that times have changed. Jobs aren’t just waiting for someone to ask to speak to the manager, and pay has not kept pace with costs of stuff increasing.
Trying to argue that a fry cook deserves to be paid as much as a skilled position will always be a non-starter.
historically a lot of those jobs were populated primarily by high school students
TIL McDonalds didn’t used to be open during the day because the majority of its workforce was in school.
Awesome! I can put another hole in my “nitpick of minor detail that doesn’t change the main point” punch card. Two more and I get a free icecream!
Nice, another person that doesn’t care about accuracy of information in their arguments.
The information is accurate. Your interpretation of my wording is so off and away from the rest of the conversation it’s hardly worth engaging with.
This isn’t debate club, a news room, or some scientific paper. You don’t “win” anything by trying to pick apart minor word choice.
I have an incredibly hard time believing you truly misunderstood the intended meaning and weren’t just excited to score what you thought was some sort of easy dunk.
In the past, the type of jobs that older generations tend to categorize as “dead end jobs meant for students” had a significant chunk of their workforce made up of students. The stereotype didn’t coalesce out of nowhere spontaneously and entirely out of the imagination of privileged assholes.
Feel free to keep on this track if you feel the need, but I’m done.
That’s just not true. Resources are split based on value of work regardless of the actual skill involved. The whole unskilled labor argument is nonsense to begin with as you point out, everything is a skill. If any rich person is complaining about unskilled labor, I’d assume they’re complaining that the skill of the employee doesn’t produce the results required so the person is unskilled, not that the job itself is unskilled. For example, a rich person complaining that the unskilled labor at McDonald’s isn’t a complaint that the job requires no skill, just that either the company didn’t train the person right or the person is unable to attain the skills necessary. After all, if they did everything properly, they wouldn’t be complaining about unskilled labor to begin with.
Obviously, that isn’t going to stand true for every instance of unskilled labor. But what it seems to me is that you’re confusing the rich with the poor. People like your parents complain about unskilled labor because they don’t understand what the rich are saying. I see that a lot. But that’s like using people who don’t understand rocket science complaining about solar flares affecting rocket ships. It’s a massive misunderstanding between the scientists who are talking about solar flares and the common man who doesn’t understand.
The mere continued use of the phrase “unskilled work” is undermining your stance. No work is unskilled.
Did you read what I wrote? I said when applying the term unskilled labor, it is applied to those who literally don’t have the skill and screwed up the product. Not that there’s work that doesn’t require skill. Or are you just trolling?
If I’m a construction worker who spent decades perfecting my skills so I get promoted to management
Tell me you’ve never worked construction without telling me you’ve never worked construction.
Or management, for that matter. You’ll get managers straight out of college overseeing career specialists on the verge of retirement.
