Kontextmaschine

2nd February 2023

Post reblogged from May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home with 103 notes

isaacsapphire:

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

morlock-holmes:

kontextmaschine:

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”?)

That sort of thing drives me nuts.

You can invent a different euphemism rather than “unskilled labor” if you like; I don’t think it’s necessary but whatever.

But the distinction is *incredibly* important if you want to think through questions of justice and power in our current economic system.

A person can be trained to do my job adequately well in the span of about 3 days; it takes quite a lot longer to become an adequate neurosurgeon.

This means that the supply of the labor I provide is much higher than the supply of neurosurgeons, which drives down the price at which I can sell my labor compared to a neurosurgeon.

This is tremendously important.

Yeah, but what the people saying “there’s no such thing as unskilled labor” are doing is taking a technical term in economics, not checking its actual definition, and then getting mad because it sounds like it means something insulting. 

Side-note, it should be easier to get a loan for gaining a certification or something else that takes you from retail/no-collar to blue-collar. And it would be a good idea for trade unions to provide those loans. 

There are absolutely people who can be trained to drive trucks but cannot be trained to be electricians. Like, I really really have to emphasize this, because apparently most people live in a class-regulated bubble and are blissfully unaware that stupid people actually exist.

Now, there’s plenty of people who have the mental, emotional, and physical capacity to do better paid, more prestigious, lower-labor supply jobs than the unskilled or semiskilled jobs they currently have! A sweep through a big box store or warehouse staff would definitely pick out some diamonds in the rough! I worked at Walmart and in low paid security jobs alongside some guys with advanced degrees who through bad fortune (one was on the hook for his ex wife’s credit card debt, the other was a refugee) ended up in a situation where despite their training, they had to take an unskilled job. And there’s definitely people who grew up poor, or with very unhelpful parents, and never had access to either financial resources or resources of the imagination, and so never were able to afford training or to even think to seek training out, but if given the encouragement and opportunity, could do more skilled work.

But you’d be left with some people who really cannot be trained to more complex tasks, or who have mental, emotional, or even physical issues that prevent them from doing more skilled work.

A note about physical issues: there’s quadriplegic lawyers out there, perfectly capable of being lawyers because while their bodies have a lot of issues, their minds are very capable and they have a lot of energy and drive to do that type of work. There’s a lot of jobs that can be done just fine by someone with a bad leg or missing fingers. But the less the body is able, the more the mind needs to be able to pick up, generally speaking in terms of work. And tons of people don’t have the chops to pass the bar or do similarly challenging mental work, so their ability to work at all gets chipped away with physical issues.

There’s people who have the mental ability to be surgeons, but don’t have to fine motor control and steady hands for it, so they can’t be surgeons.

Yeah that last bit about hands and motor control resonates bcuz like I am extremely mentally on the ball and that and had the good fine motor control that went with that and was kinda ambiguous what I thought of the idea of surgeons’ or pianists’ “talented fingers”

Then I think from rough devil-may-care use of my hands I had started to see some loss of fingertip sensation and was like hmm

(That was what I first mistook Covid nerve issues for a progression of, flipside in the post-Covid recovery the sensation’s largely back, I thought it was permanent loss from blunt trauma but apparently it devoted enough effort to remapping nerve pathways)

But then neural Covid wiped that and even pretty recovered now there is shit that is still gatekept by motor control. Like I am nowhere near ready to try my banjo again.