Dude, who even knows.

20th January 2023

Post reblogged from Woefully Beefless with 103 notes

space-wizards:

kontextmaschine:

All those posts like ::video of employee in a low-prestige job accomplishing a lot of stuff really efficiently from experience:: “you call this unskilled labor?” like, yes, it doesn’t matter how effectively you can execute the role but whether a rando could execute it at all.

“I can do this at 5X speed!”

Okay, that means your employer could replace you with 5 guys off the street, and will if he thinks that’ll cost less (in direct wages and say your ability to leverage your position in labor conflict). So your job security and labor power still ultimately fluctuates with the market and the unemployment rate.

(“Semiskilled” labor is stuff that requires training but any given laborer can be trained for. Basically anyone can be trained to drive trucks, so that’s semiskilled. Even if many people could be trained for it [and thus guild restrictions on intake are critical to maintaining labor power] not everyone in a lineup could be turned into an electrician, so that’s skilled)

Who can be trained to drive trucks, but can’t be trained to be an electrician, though? Unskilled-semiskilled-skilled seems more like a spectrum than a ternary. Probably defined as “% of training on the job/in the classroom” and a modifier for length of training. 

Yeah, there’s ambiguities. Like nursing, is an LPN semiskilled and an RN skilled? (Do they still have unskilled/intern “candy-stripers”?)

Tagged: skilled laborunskilled laborsemiskilled labor

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    Yeah that last bit about hands and motor control resonates bcuz like I am extremely mentally on the ball and that and...
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