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6E696365 | 1 year ago

Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."

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WalterBright|1 year ago

The local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.

That makes it unskilled labor.

Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.

onion2k|1 year ago

It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.

Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.

cammikebrown|1 year ago

How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista? You should try it out sometime, with a 50 person line. I’m sure it’ll be a cake walk and your labor will be fairly compensated. I’ll even give you a 3 day head start just to be fair!

Aloisius|1 year ago

Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.

It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.

https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0968.htm

account-5|1 year ago

> Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.

This is nearly all jobs.

tbrownaw|1 year ago

Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?

lnxg33k1|1 year ago

To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette

gruez|1 year ago

The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work?

On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.

uolmir|1 year ago

Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.