But that’s kind of the point. It may be “work a lot of people can do”, but it’s not “anyone”. Some people are just better at things, and some people just suck at them. Kitchen work is like that. Give two people the same basic ingredients, and tell them to make a given dish, and it’s entirely possible that one of them will give you the best meal you’ve ever had, while the other one will give you a plate of (literally) hot garbage.
Even in a franchised restaurant where they have everything pre-portioned with extremely detailed directions on how to make the perfect standardized food, people can find ways to screw up. Everyone who’s ever worked in a kitchen probably has at least one story to tell like that.
A while back I saw a news magazine TV show where they profiled a couple of businesses that changed to pay their employees better and offer benefits. One was a restaurant and one was a hotel. In both cases, they had fewer employees and each employee had more tasks. In the restaurant, the cooks would also bring out the food. In the hotel, the front desk clerks would also clean the rooms. So instead of something like having three employees doing different jobs, they have two employees who do all three jobs. The two employees are paid better because they are taking the salary of the missing 3rd person. I don’t recall if they mentioned this, but I wonder if their payroll overall stayed the same.
This is also seen in places like McDonalds, where cashiers are replaced with kiosks and simple shake machines that need daily cleaning are replaced by expensive automated machines which can go 14 days before they need to be opened up for cleaning.
So although these kinds of places may be paying better, they may also have a smaller workforce and only hire people who can perform multiple jobs and handle complex tasks. A business hiring a $15-20/hr worker is going to expect someone who brings a lot of value to the business. A person who has a limited skill set or not able to handle complex tasks may find it tougher to find a job with this new pay scale.
I think there is a difference between pointing out that unskilled work is just that… unskilled. It literally means that anyone can do it, and that there’s nothing distinguishing you from anyone else when that’s the sort of job you have to do.
It doesn’t mean anything about you as a person, or what sort of dignity you should have, but it does have everything to do with what an employer is willing to pay you- the whole goal is to get a job where you’re hard to replace, because your set of skills and experience is such that they can’t easily find someone just like you. Doing unskilled labor is kind of like the exact opposite of that.
And that’s a basic aspect of labor economics. Wages aren’t set because of someone’s definition of fairness. There’s always ways to trade off labor versus capital. So, using kiosks rather than humans often makes sense. Even some lower level chain restaurants are going to the iPad on the table.
Now raising wages because service industry jobs are increasingly undesirable, that also makes sense. While working fast food may not be quite as bad as working in a coal mine, it’s definitely gotten worse.
As someone who worked fast food for 9 years, everyone can’t do fast food. You need a certain literacy level. You need to be able to work fast and much of the time think fast. Even though cash registers these days calculate change, you still need to be able to figure out what combination of coins you use to give the customer back $.92.
If fast food isn’t unskilled work, the definition of unskilled work is useless. I mean - hey, digging a ditch requires being able to use tools and coordinate your muscles - that’s a skill, therefore it’s skilled work.
Any reasonable definition of unskilled work would includes fast food. “Unskilled” doesn’t mean “literally any human being including Hellen Keller can perform the job”, it means “it does not require specialized education or training outside of normal short term on the job training”
One thing about jobs like fast food is that while yes, a person can be brought up to "more productive than what they cost to employ " in a week or so, experience does continue to make you better. I remember being in HS working at McDonald’s and the adults/full time people were incredible. They could sweep the floor in half the time I took, and get up twice as much. And I wasn’t bad. Do a thing for 5 or ten years, you get really, really efficient.
So while workers may be fairly interchangeable, no matter how “unskilled” the work, a place with a 200% turnover rate is not going to be nearly as functional as a place with a stable core if experienced employees. Not only do they train the revolving door employees, they serve as a competent foundation in each shift and provide institutional memory about situations (and proposed solutions) that come up regularly.
Yes, but that’s not the only part of the supply/demand curve. Sure, its not a touchy feely fairness thing…but if there’s more demand for labor than there is supply, then something has to happen to up the supply (increase wages)
If all of the equations cannot be met, the company goes out of business…until there are few enough businesses to handle the demand at a profit that allows them to stay in business.
For a whole lot of jobs, however, it’s used to mean ‘nearly anybody can learn how to more or less do this in a short period of time.’
Which is not at all the same thing as ‘nearly anybody can learn how to do this really well while also doing it at a good level of speed’, and is most certainly not the same as ‘nearly anybody can learn, in a short period of time, how to do this really well while also doing it at a good level of speed’.
I did just enough waiting on tables to figure out the difference. Sure, I could get plates from the kitchen to the table. But I was terrible at the job. If I’d done it for enough years, I would have gotten better; but I would never have been excellent at it, because my facial recognition and speed of pickup on social cues aren’t good enough.
We could certainly change the term ‘unskilled’ to something else, but I agree we need a definition for work that doesn’t require prior training or experience.
However, the ‘anyone can do it’ thing just isn’t true. Some of those jobs may not require specialized training, but they often require specialized people - people whose temperaments allow them to do jobs that can be endlessly tedious, require lots of physical exertion, require them to remain cool in stressful situations, etc.
There are a lot of brilliant academics who literally wouldn’t last a day in a lot of ‘unskilled’ jobs. Some of them really do take special people who have a certain resilience of mind and spirit that others don’t have, or who take pleasure in working outdoors or with their hands, and who don’t mind boredom.
I think the thing is that most companies do one of a few things- either they rely on some sort of external mechanism to reward competence (i.e. tips), they try to routinize the jobs to the point where skill/experience don’t really matter, or they just don’t value it- they’d rather pay another person minimum wage and suffer the performance hit, than pay someone experienced another 25 cents an hour.
It seems to be rare that a company will value experience and skill over money at that level of their workforce, and that to me, is the big problem. They view their unskilled workers as essentially interchangeable, and viewing them that way has historically meant that they’re not terribly valued, as if someone wants something different than what’s offered, they can be replaced without much if any disruption.
Or who aren’t bored, because most of their mind is working on something else, while the body’s digging holes or pulling weeds.
And many of the jobs that most people think of as not requiring specialized knowledge require quite a bit of it. Telling when a melon is ripe is a skill. Telling when a melon of a given type (the tells vary with the type of melon, waiting for slip on a variety that doesn’t work on will leave you with a pile of mush) is ripe enough for a specific market (farmers’ market tomorrow is different from shipping market in which the customer will probably get it no sooner than next week, and both are harder to judge than ready-to-eat-right-now) is a complicated skill, that involves both eyesight and exactly what a given amount of give to pressure feels like on one’s own particular hands. Doing this at speed all day long requires having learned that complex of skills well enough that each decision takes a fraction of a second, and having trained one’s muscles so that it’s possible both to keep up the speed all day and to still be able to move the next day, and the one after – not something that can be done in a day or two, and not something that everyone can do at all.
Most professional hand harvesters learn all of this, not for one crop, but for dozens.
Farmers in general have to be jack-of-all-trades. The number of skills you need to have to be a successful farmer are immense. You may not need a degree (although lots of farmers send their kids to get degreesmin agriculture, animal husbandry, etc), but you need to be able to do accohnting math, work with a large variety of dangerous tools and equipment, understand the weather, plan out activities months/years in advance, work woth animals, be a mechanic, know how to analyze and solve problems without leaning on others, etc.
It’s far from ‘unskilled’. I’m pretty sure it would take longer for someone starting from scratch to learn to be an effective farmer than to learn to be a coder or HR person or any number of degreed, white collar positions.
I don’t think most economists (and the terms skilled vs unskilled labor come from an academic econ background), refer to farmers as unskilled labor. In fact, farmers are usually categorized as their whole own category, separate from regular types of labor because many of the ways they operate are so dissimilar from most other types of labor done in the economy.
The historical use of the terms skilled vs unskilled were basically:
Anyone in the various crafts or trades guilds = Skilled labor, essentially because either apprenticeship or some form of education was required to do the labor, someone brought in off the street simply would not be able to do the job satisfactorily in a day’s training or even a week
Anyone in jobs where you could basically be hired off the street and be fairly up to speed with some short orientation = unskilled labor
This actually worked fairly well with describing the lion’s share of industrial labor in the 19th and early 20th century. Farmers didn’t make sense for it back then, and were not considered part of the discussion.
You may be asking where the white-collar workers are? Technically the true professional class was not considered “labor” at all, in 19th century thinking, they were often classified as management (which was seen as distinct from labor.) They also made up a much smaller percentage of the workforce at the time.
In modern eras you see a lot of econ papers start using terms like semiskilled labor or moving away from the paradigm entirely. You also see a ton of econ papers that have started to just call skilled labor “college or college+ education required jobs” and unskilled labor as jobs that don’t require a college degree, which may work for whatever that economist is trying to talk about in the context of their paper, but as a matter of political economic policy it’s not a good way to look at things as there’s a lot of differences between someone like a master welder and a toll booth worker.
Yeah, I always have understood that the skilled/unskilled labor divide is a division within blue collar jobs, and that the white/blue collar divide is another thing entirely.
And that divide seems to still be there, even if the guilds/apprenticeships aren’t really there anymore. I mean, there’s a HUGE difference in training necessary to be a mechanic versus a quick-lube technician. There are usually certifications/titles of some kind involved with skilled labor- master plumber, ASE certified mechanics, MCSA, A+, etc… Unskilled labor typically doesn’t have those sorts of certifications or training requirements- most retail jobs are unskilled in that sense, as are most restaurant jobs, even if there is a lot of actual skill involved in doing them well.
Farming is interesting, in that there are a quite a few pertinent agricultural degrees available at schools that offer them - animal science, poultry science, soil & crop management, agronomy, agriculture, horticulture, rangeland ecology and management, and so on. But there’s not a requirement that someone go to college to be a farmer.
Agreed. Running a farm is one of the most complicated things one can do for a living; especially if it’s a diversified farm.
However, what I was pointing out was that even just working as a hand harvester, hired by the person(s) who’s taking care of almost all the other stuff, takes genuine skills of both mind and body.
Haha! I remember being pressed into digging out potatoes as a 13 year old when I was sent to spend summer holidays on a farm. It was a lot harder than I expected, and a whole lot less fun. Didn’t help that it was 40C+ in the shade and we weren’t in the shade!
Yup. And potatoes are easy – you only need to be able to tell them from rocks (and even that’s not a problem if the soil in that field isn’t rocky.) You don’t have to judge whether each individual potato is ready to harvest or not.
ETA: telling potatoes from rocks of similar size when they’re all covered with the same soil can actually take a moment; but they don’t generally feel the same in the hand. And somebody’s probably sorting them again somewhere further along in the process, anyway.
