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I worked long months in the forestry industry (re-planting trees) during university it’s not so tough as sex work but sometimes people throw it in the bag of “l
by acc_297 3y ago
I worked long months in the forestry industry (re-planting trees) during university it’s not so tough as sex work but sometimes people throw it in the bag of “low-skill” or “manual labour” jobs as if thought or critical thinking we’re not required.
I have to say now working a “real” job now (for salary benefits etc.) I know way more forestry folks who could do my job today (consulting) than current coworkers who could dig out a stuck pickup truck properly, fix a broken generator, put out a brush fire…
there are jobs which require accreditation or whatever but there’s no such thing as truly no-skill-required labour
- j-bos 3y agoThis is how I feel coming from the trades into the offices, my colleagues are often surprised when I say the work we do is easy.
- smabie 3y agoI mean, if this was true, then why do office workers generally earn more?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Baeocystin 3y agoTrades peak lower, which drives the average higher for white collar work, but I think if you look at the median income for both, trades are actually higher. FWIW.
- quinnjh 3y agoWho earned more, the architect for the pharoahs pyramid or the person pushing one of the massive slabs of rock? Which job was harder?
- whimsicalism 3y agoThe question is which job requires more skill, not which job is harder
- quinnjh 3y agoWho earned more, the architect for the pharaohs pyramid or the people pushing one of the massive slabs of rock? Which job was harder?
- legends2k 3y agoDepends on who you ask. Physically the rock-pusher job is harder. Mentally the architect's. I'd say pay comes in based on demand. Do we have more brainy folks or brawny folks?
- seventhtiger 3y agoThe ox that pulled the cart. So now what? This kind of measuring jobs by efforts always ends up being won by an animal or machine. Even among humans, the guy digging ditches with his bare hands is putting in more work than the guy using a shovel. It ends up being a stupid incentive structure, and is not a replacement for supply and demand in the labor market.
- memefrog 3y agoThe question was which job required more skill. And the answer is very clearly: the architect's.
- robocat 3y agoBecause money is not the only thing we gain by working. And few people optimise 100% for money. People work jobs for status, friends, pride, social good, stimulation, etcetera. I have friends who change between different types of jobs, and their reasons are often surprising.
- nullc 3y agoPosition in the production hierarchy. Consider a person that carves bespoke wooden figurines. Their job takes considerable skill, even talent. But it takes then X hours to make Y figurines. Time in, widgets out, completely proportional. Now imagine a person that configures a robot to carve crappy mass produced figurines. Their work is differently skilled, but perhaps less so. The product isn't as good. Yet they put in their time once and the machine cranks out enormous quantities with minimal additional work from them. This has high leverage, they can command more pay because their leveraged work has more value. You can go further up the hierarchy, to the people who organize or direct the technicians or the channels that distribute the products of their machines. Their work is further abstracted, skilled in its own way but not necessarily more so. But the amount of income their efforts command is greater still-- even more leveraged. In areas where the use of the high-skill low-leverage work are largely optional-- say custom carpentry-- they often become unavailable because the sort of highly competent people who would excel at these tasks can make more money in a highly leveraged (but perhaps less skilled!) job writing boilerplate javascript to deliver advertising or whatever. In areas where the non-scalable work isn't optional, like medical doctors-- the prices tend to shoot through the sky in part due to the income an equivalent aptitude could command in a more leveraged position. In between the two extremes we have workers that are just flat underpaid, and we rationalize the situation by imagining that they're less deserving. As the article points out, many of these lowly paid jobs are highly skilled in their own way-- at least if done well. What they don't have, however, is a big initial training barrier to entry that limits the supply of capable people and puts market power for this labor onto the supply side. Skill isn't a factor in wages except in so far as the required skill impacts the level of supply or demand in the supply/demand balance. I think we often underestimate the capability of the average person because we can't know the average person and can't see first hand the depth of their ability and because we also so often put that average person in a situation that just doesn't exercise those latent abilities (or do, but do so in ways we don't respect due to cultural biases).
- foobiekr 3y agoThe problem with this logic is that it only sort of works. I know a lot of executives personally and most of them are not high skill at all. Most of them aren't even very bright. I guess you could make the case that their primary skill - reading the story that the people who promoted them wanted/needed to hear - is in fact what's being rewarded, but it has nothing to do with their applicability to high leverage work at all.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoSkills to collaborate across multiple nodes/tasks are challenging in a different way, and some who might be good working solo flail when managing human interactions across multiple power centers.
- tuatoru 3y agoThis made me laugh out loud, at the sheer political naivete. Office workers earn more because they do jobs more similar to the jobs of those who allocate money.
- brabel 3y agoWell, your take also seem pretty naive. Salaries in non-regulated jobs are a function of supply VS demand, that's pretty much all. I would say office work does not actually pay more, it depends. Easy office-hand jobs probably pay much less than your previous job... but when it does pay more, it's simply because there's fewer people willing and capable of doing that job as a rate of the number of people actually needed for such tasks. When a job is regulated (requires license, or is protected by some law etc) the equation is skewed, usually in favour of a profession.
- whimsicalism 3y agoThis is a factor, but to say it is the factor is nonsense. Supply vs demand dynamics very much do exist. I get paid a lot, I also create measurably more than my salary in value.
- throwawawaw 3y agoSupply/demand dynamics do exist. However, it is naive to believe that supply and demand are orthogonal. Desire is mimetic: you demand what you see others demanding. 99% of everything is either a layer of misdirection or support infrastructure for a layer of misdirection.
- nojvek 3y agoIsn’t that supply and demand? You’re in demand because you create more value than you capture. Your employer loves that about you. If they could find someone cheaper who produced even more value, they’d replace you.
- whimsicalism 3y agoYes that is exactly my point
- scns 3y agoMy theory is: The more people you help earn money, the more you earn. Private Equity is explicitly excluded, maybe they do, who knows? Example 1 Bill Gates/Microsoft: Provided a stable platform for business software to run on, making it possible for millions of businesses to do accounting/inventory management/controlling CNC machinery/etc. Example 2 Sales People/Marketing: If you got the best product/software/whatever but zero customers, how are you you gonna pay your bills? [edit] Example 3 Jeff Bezos: Building the dominant platform for e-commerce of all kinds. Making it easy for a huge crowd of potential customers to discover and buy your wares.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I mean, if this was true, then why do office workers generally earn more? Because the work (1) takes particular skills, and (2) skills that are functionally gatekept so they are disproportionately found in people coming from a middle class (or, at minimum, proletarian intelligentsia) background. It has work that is (compared to lots of more poorly paid jobs) hard to find people minimally qualified to do, but its not hard (in the sense of arduous) work, for the most part. Work being arduous doesn’t make it well-paid.
- memefrog 3y agoYes, the work takes more skills. It is not 'functionally gatekept'.
- Baeocystin 3y agoI used to weld in a shipyard, and one of the things I miss about it was that literally everyone I worked with was skilled and knowledgeable about our work. There was literally no way to fake being able to do what we did, so all the ego-first blowhards crashed out before they could affect our day-to-day much. It was refreshing.
- systems_glitch 3y agoBurn that jet rod! All trades are like that to one degree or another. I end up working with a lot of factory/plant maintenance personnel, and yeah there's the occasional dropout who's not pulling his weight, but mostly it's super competent people no matter what their responsibility is. In jobs at semiconductor fab places, usually the head of maintenance holds a master's or PhD and still rebuilds turbopumps and blown out ion gauges when needed.
- XargonEnder 3y agoI think a lot of people in the office pretend to be less competent than they are to avoid getting assigned more work.
- memefrog 3y agoThere is such a thing as low-skill labour. Nobody said 'no skill required'. The term is low-skill. Of the people I have met that do manual labouring jobs, I know many people could do those jobs if they got fit and learnt to do them, and that those people could not learn to do intellectual work no matter how hard they tried. Also working in the forestry industry is much harder than having sex for a living.