I actually do dig them out with a digging fork, though the ground is at least supposed to be not particularly hard; but I’m often working alone, and I don’t grow many potatoes. Most farms the next size up do most of the digging with a tractor, with harvesters coming along on foot behind and combing the potatoes out of loosened soil; and then most farms of any size have machinery that digs up and dumps the potatoes onto a belt which loads them into a bin attached to a second tractor, most of the soil sifting out along the way.
Sure. Although I wouldn’t call them skills, which implies an activity learned, but rather personal characteristics. For instance, some people just have mo tolerance for discomfort, and could never work a job that involves working in freezing cold or baking sun. But I wouldn’t call that a skill. An advantage, a useful trait, a capacity… sure.
My problem was boredom. I once worked a summer job tamping in fence posts for a new airport with a 30 lb tamping rod. Another summer I broke concrete foundations with a sledgehammer. I was physically capable of doing both and I didn’t mind the physical exertion - but having to go hours without mental stimulation drove me nuts. Minutes went by like hours. I envied the guys who didn’t have that problem, and knew I couldn’t do it permanently.
Getting back to the OP, the Votemaster had an interesting item about it today: ElectoralVote. Basically, it says that the 14th plague led eventually to the end of feudalism in the 14th century. Here is one paragraph:
“When the peasantry was nearly wiped out, the law of supply and demand kicked in. Nobles needed peasants to work the land and when they almost instantaneously became scarce, the peasants could demand a better deal. Scarce surviving peasants could suddenly confront their lords and say: “I’m not paying you 60% of my grain anymore. The noble in the next town is demanding only 40%. Toodle-oo.” All of a sudden in the labor market, the sellers of labor (the “employees”) had the power, not the buyers (the “employers”). In places where the plague claimed the most victims, primarily in Western Europe, where there was more trade with sh*thole—no, sorry, we mean rat-infested—countries, the effect was much bigger than in Eastern Europe, which had less trade and many fewer deaths from the plague.”
I think you misread the post. She explained how hand picking melons or strawberries or tomatoes apparently requires lots of skilled knowledge about which to pick and which to leave, and the ability to assess very very quickly as you move across a field. She is a farmer who hires pickers. Way past simple temperament.
That may be true for a small, specialty farm, but it doesn’t seem consistent with commercial farming. In that environment, the crew is just going down the line picking everything. I’m sure it’s physically hard work, but it doesn’t seem like the pickers are making a lot of critical decisions.
Another way where personal traits might help or hurt with a job is something like bartending. Pretty much anyone can learn to be a bartender, but good listening and empathy are going to be more important to a local corner bar where the clientele is 80% regulars than to an airport bar. The guy working the corner bar is going to have to deal with regulars who come in and announce they’ve just lost their job or are getting divorced. The guy at the airport just needs to be fast and efficient as people have planes to catch and most of the conversation will be about where the bathrooms are or where a gate is.
The same would go to someone working at a craft beer bar, beer nerds are going to want to talk more than just ‘regular or light?’
I described some of the actual learned skills needed to do just one of the simpler jobs hired laborers do on farms.
See post #132.
You couldn’t find mental stimulation within your own head?
I design fictional societies, sometimes. Or work out what I might want to say on a messageboard, or to my congresscritter; or what I think is right or wrong about arguments being made in something I was reading the night before.
Also works well for some types of meditation.
Nope. I’ve done a bit of migrant labor work (I wasn’t nearly as good at it as the people who’d grown up doing it.) The things that can be picked by ‘going down the line picking everything’ are on large farms all done by machine, these days.
Worst job I ever had was a data entry job when I was like 17. Not only was it boring, but it wasn’t the sort of job where you could just use your brain for other things while mindlessly doing it. You had to pay attention to what you were doing, and the work was being done for lawyers filing a giant lawsuit and the error rate had to be really low. So you couldn’t do any sort of creative mental work, but at the same time you were getting no stimulation whatsoever. It was like being in an mental prison for 4-8 hours. It was my first job and I didn’t have the context to understand just how uniquely miserable it was, so I stuck it out for like 6 miserable months.
Ideally they’ll be growing determinate crops (those where they all ripen at the same time), which helps facilitate that sort of pick everything approach.
The fact that “digging ditches” is the quintessential example of “unskilled labor” that “anyone can do” just highlights how useless that term is outside of propaganda.
Actually, the best ditch digger I know is an absolute artist with a backhoe. Shovels do also get involved – one of the things he knows is which to use when.
Well, that would be okay for truly mindless work, but daydreaming and swinging heavy implements don’t mix well. You have to pay attention to what you are doing - it’s just boring.
I had the best fast food bosses ever in college. They were the best because of two things - but it was really only one thing. They valued us - and therefore they were willing to pay me $5 an hour when minimum was three and change, and they backed us up when customers were nasty. When a customer started with “I’m never coming here again” it was not uncommon to them to reply “Customers like you I don’t need” . They had less turnover than I’ve ever heard of in a fast-food place - 5 years after they opened, they still had 10 or 15 of the group they hired before opening. Nobody who was good at the job left to go work at another restaurant - why would we take a pay cut to be treated worse? Which is why I find it hard to believe that raising wages will cause the prices to go up so much that sales will drop enough for the business to actually be unprofitable. Because my bosses were absolutely making plenty of money even though they were paying much more than other locations of the same chain with similar prices. They might have made more in profit if they paid minimum - but they still apparently made enough. There’s a huge difference between “less profit than I would like” and “unprofitable”.
Is this some sort of silly attempt to claim that “All work is skilled work!” because there can be skill involved in doing even “unskilled work”?
“Unskilled labor” is a descriptive term meant to define a category of jobs that don’t require significant training, theoretical underpinnings, etc…, that generally require no prior experience or education, and are usually learned on the job.
“Skilled labor” describes jobs that aren’t white collar jobs, but that require some significant combination of training and experience in order to be qualified to do the job. You can’t just go be a bricklayer, plumber, welder, carpenter, etc… those jobs are all “skilled labor”, meaning that there’s usually some sort of trade school and/or apprenticeship involved before you can be hired in those jobs.
NONE of this is meant to imply that someone doing “unskilled labor” is not skilled at that job, or that they’re somehow lesser because of it. Clearly it does take skill to be a good janitor, fruit harvester, retail sales person, etc… But it does not take prior training, education or experience to start doing those jobs.
For example, ditch digging may take a lot of skill, but in economic terms, it’s “unskilled labor”, because “unskilled labor” means something very specific that doesn’t actually have anything to do with actual ditch digging skill.
It’s interesting how this keeps going around in circles with semantics games.
No one is questioning that the labor department had definitions for “skilled labor” vs “unskilled labor.”
What is being said is that it still does require skills to do “unskilled labor”. The words in the title do not define the requirements.
Then the idea that these jobs are “unskilled” gets used to say that they require no skills, which means that people feel that they are fungible, that one person is just as good as another, that a person who has been doing the job for years had nothing of value to add over someone who started yesterday.
Then these same people wonder why their fast food lines are long, and why they get their orders wrong, and why the quality of their food is terrible.
It probably matters when the tipping point is for these jobs between novice and master, and when it no longer makes a difference to the business. Like with burger flipping, I would guess that a novice could become a master in a relatively short time. Someone who has been flipping burgers for years might not be all that different from someone who has been doing it for months or maybe even weeks. I don’t think a 10-year flipper would be all that much more efficient and productive compared to a 6-month flipper. If someone can achieve master level for the task in a relatively short time on the job, then it probably leads to a glut of workers with that skill. Businesses prefer someone with experience, but they’re not picky if they know they can bring someone up to speed relatively quickly. The business won’t feel the need to pay a master flipper a high rate if they know they can bring a minimum wage worker to that level.
And in many fast-food jobs, the corporation has streamlined the process to be as fool-proof as possible. It’s designed to be done by people with no experience on purpose. This allows them to hire people with no skill for a low rate. They made significant investments into the streamlined process so that they can be profitable with low-skilled employees.
A job routinely performed by teenagers that “requires no previous experience or consisting of routine tasks for which little training is required” is pretty darn fungible. Is there a complete lack of differentiation between the noob and the veteran? No. But it’s rounding error compared to the reqs I have out.
And that’s not to say two similarly unskilled and inexperienced workers are going to perform the same. See the Starbucks and Dunks that opened on the same block a few jobs back that were clearly hiring from different pools for similar jobs. UVA students vs Charlottesville locals led to a different customer experience.
And that the people who do them are those who are happy to live in a state of mindless boredom.
Coming back to this:
Maybe it’s a particular trick in the mind. While I’ve never spent all day swinging a sledgehammer (the closest I’ve come to that is a couple of hours at a stretch spent woodsplitting, but every piece of wood is different and needs to be considered to see where the strike needs to land for a successful split), I’ve spent five or six days a week for months pruning grapes, which is a job done with a sharp pair of shears in one hand and the other hand very often quite close to the blades. Again, every vine is different, so it’s necessary to pay attention both to the vine and to the relative location of the cut and the other hand – but I never had any problem either carrying on a conversation, or working out something inside my own head, while doing that; and while I don’t know what was inside their heads when they weren’t talking, other workers never seemed to have any problem carrying on conversations.
Also, to some extent, “boring” is in the head. Most office jobs, including ones that these days require degrees, strike me as extremely boring (and yes, I’ve done some of that too). So does mechanics’ work; but I know people who are fascinated by mechanics’ work, but find vineyard or other farm handwork utterly boring, because they’re not interested in the differences between one vine/weed/whatever and the next. I’m not interested in the differences between one bolt and the next, and find it only annoying when it’s hard to figure out how to get a tool on one – but they’re interested in that.
So they should be mechanics, and I should be doing the kind of farming I’m doing (which does involve some being a mechanic and some doing officework, but those are neither the parts I do or like best), and people who find a whole mess of figures and spreadsheets interesting should be accountants, and so on. But it’s got nothing to do with one kind of work being “mindless” when another isn’t.
That IS the point though, or was anyway. Employers did treat them as fungible, because they basically were. Until the pandemic, it was a buyer’s market for labor, and companies could treat their lowest wage employees like they were interchangeable. The difference between an experienced and skilled fast food worker wasn’t worth paying them more at that point.
That’s not the case these days, but it doesn’t seem that the employers have got the memo yet.