5 ms·

A Lot of 'Unskilled' Workers Aren't

46 points by petethomas 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago
Amazing how often "unskilled" is used to describe those whose skills are merely low on the social prestige scale, or who are ill-positioned to ensure that they & their peers get an oversized slice of the economic pie...
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Skills that are low on the prestige scale are unskilled. Skills that pay well automatically rate higher on the prestige scale. Skills that pay poorly are skills that can be easily provided by whoever, which is what "unskilled" means. I have lots of skills that would be incredibly valuable in an ant context; that doesn't mean they count as "skills" in a human context.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > Skills that pay well automatically rate higher on the prestige scale. This is pretty true. Though manual labor usually has less prestige at equal pay. > Skills that pay poorly are skills that can be easily provided by whoever This is much less true. There are plenty of skills that require a master's degree level of learning but also pay poorly.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      > There are plenty of skills that require a master's degree level of learning but also pay poorly. There are many more of such masters than the market needs, so the pay drops until Demand meets Supply.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        Of course. But low demand doesn't make them unskilled, right? I'm arguing against the idea that low pay/prestige makes them unskilled.
        Ekaros 2y ago
        You could even have extremely skilled, moderately paid, but still relatively low prestige. And top of the trades pyramid go to this category. Think of specialised welders, were you need both years of expertise and probably quite a bit of aptitude... And the job is no way unskilled, but still would have less prestige in general population than some simpler job more of white collar type.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    There is also the case of the 'outcast' skills which are currently stigmatized. Unless there is a literal caste of people stuck doing these jobs they tend to ironically have to pay better. Porn actresses get paid in part for the 'reputational damage' as even today people are deeply silly/stupid about past work. Skilled labor in terms of "needs many years training" outcast skills are practically a hypothetical, and are what I would call 'high entropy' in the sense that it would take a lot of work and rare combinations to achieve. Practically an exercise for science fiction writers to depict say, a society where say heart surgery is viewed as deeply shameful yet still managed to perfect the art of heart surgery anyway.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The more skilled a person is, the fewer such persons there are. The fewer there are, the more compensation they can demand. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    If you hold everything equal, then changes in supply work that way. But everything else is very far from equal across different types of job, enough to make supply-based calculations basically useless.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      The market is very very good at price arbitrage. Far, far better than central economic price setting, as endless experience shows.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Seattle recently tried to set hourly rates for gig delivery drivers. It resulted in a collapse of that business, as prices went so high the demand dropped and the drivers made less.
      - analognoise 2y ago
        Is that true if the central planners had access to the digital data of Walmart, Costco, Target, Amazon, etc all at the same time? I wonder if the amount of data needed for efficient central planning is now here.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Yes, it always applies. Even to monopoly pricing.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        The mistake make with such data is that it can predict the future. At best, if the data is fairly accurate and complete it is only a good indicator of the past. The fundamental flaw of central planning at scale is that a small number of people will sustainably predict the future well enough to plan better than if they let individuals make decisions for themselves.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
No such thing as unskilled labor.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The longer it takes to train someone to do a job, the more skilled it is.
- missedthecue 2y ago
  If anyone with a pulse can do it, it's unskilled. And I say this having worked those jobs for a number of years.
  - nik282000 2y ago
    Being able to dig a ditch and being able to dig a ditch well are two different things. I've worked with people who can't do basic tasks after a decade at the same place.
notamy 2y ago
http://archive.today/p5LPz http://archive.today/p5LPz
WalterBright 2y ago
> an AI program can likely do that, too Hahaha. Yesterday I spent a half hour with Comcast's AI phone chatbot. No matter how I tried, it could not understand "cancel Hulu subscription." Finally, it connected me with a human who I said "cancel Hulu subscription" to, and he cancelled it. Mission Accomplished! But the AI chatbot was a total failure. I am preparing my presentation for DConf, and thought I'd try some relevant pictures. I asked it to "draw a square wheel". It drew a round one. I tried many variations, never got a square wheel, although grok insisted it was a square wheel. I now and then ask AI to write a function for me. The generated code always looks plausible, but there are always catastrophic bugs in them. The function will include tests (hooray!) but does not include answers to check the results against (boo!). It doesn't take long to realize that AI has no idea what you're asking for. AI has a loooong way to go.
- ckcheng 2y ago
  > Comcast's AI phone chatbot. No matter how I tried, it could not understand "cancel Hulu Seems working as intended? I’ve used a bank and Starbucks chatbots for customer service. Both times they seem so rudimentary and bad that it seemed anything could’ve been better, no LLM required. It took so much effort to get thru to a human. I have to believe it was designed that way, to fob off as many as possible.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The thought definitely occurred to me. Afterwards, it asked me to rate the bot from 0..10. I gave it a zero. I don't recall ever having a positive outcome with a customer service chatbot.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      A couple years ago, at $Job, I got a call from a Comcast "customer satisfaction" surveybot, after a frustrating interaction with Comcast's "press any button to accomplish more nothing" phone system. I gave the latter a very low rating. Our Comcast internet connection went out a couple minutes later.
freeone3000 2y ago
“Easily replacable” labor then
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 2y ago
> A person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage. There are different meanings to the word "worth". In the market place, your "worth" is how much value you can create for the person who pays you. Your worth to your family is something entirely different. It's like the innumerable definitions of the word "free". I've seen many people try to make points by conflating multiple such definitions. The article does this with "worth". It's a worthless(!) argument.
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  [dead]
kulahan 2y ago
This feels like a victim in search of a problem. It’s an economic term used to refer to people who are in easily-replaceable positions. You can drop someone in, give them on the job training, and they’ll have it mostly figured out in a couple weeks. This is not a judgement of the people working those jobs, and never has been really. Besides, call them literally whatever you want - that will become the new slur on the treadmill of euphemisms.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  imo the real economic danger is the regulatory response that institutes bureaucratic functions to create fake "jobs" in the form of mandatory human roles in companies that have nothing to do with the product or mission, stifling the whole economy with bureaucracy. the thing about automation is that it's a proxy for regulation and governance, and the "freeside" economy will still use a lot of manual work becuase nobody will want the administrative overhead of dealing with AI.
cortesoft 2y ago
My understanding is that an “unskilled” job has always meant a job that doesn’t require previous experience. It has nothing to do with how hard the job is or how valuable the work is, just whether or not it requires prior training or not.
- antihipocrat 2y ago
  To add to this, I think it's also whether prior training will make a substantial improvement in productivity.
- strken 2y ago
  Yeah, I always assumed it meant a job where the lowest level was accessible without training. Economists don't have a reason to distinguish between a job that will build skills versus one that won't, and I'm not sure the latter even exists. One example from the article was working as a caregiver. My brother worked as a disability carer while he was training to become an engineer. I was living with him at the time, and he started out with a baseline ability to care for others, no particular skills that an average person wouldn't have, and no qualifications other than a police check and a first aid certificate. He was essentially paid to drive people with mental disabilities around and not get frustrated with them. On the one hand, I get why someone with 20 years experience as a disability carer wouldn't want their job to be seen as something a uni student can pick up in a week. On the other hand, my brother could just go become a carer, so it's not entirely wrong.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  That doesn't encompass most of what people call unskilled labor. Even basic restaurant and big box store listings will typically ask for prior experience in restaurants or retail.
- nradov 2y ago
  The terms are a bit vague and prone to misinterpretation but economists usually refer to skilled labor jobs as those requiring certain mandatory credentials. Could be an educational degree or an occupational certificate or a government license. Some of those certificates or licenses also have minimum work experience requirements.
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
https://archive.is/p5LPz https://archive.is/p5LPz
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
loongloong 2y ago
"Unskilled labour" isn't the same as "unskilled worker" IMHO more appropriate would be "low skilled labour". We should use the correct term when describing jobs that require little specialised skill and separate them from the persons performing it (who may be very skillful in other non-related areas). If there is cultural stigma in using this term, should we sacrifice accuracy and succinctness in technical/professional discussions on related topics by dancing around with terminologies? If we "evolve" and use a new term that is not currently associated with the same stigma, will this neutral term eventually still be associated with the same stigma? If so, is it worth the effort and penalties (e.g. interim confusion) as a whole? I am genuinely curious about this, I think there are many good points on "both sides of the coin".
Animats 2y ago
Why, skilled workers belong to an American Federation of Labor craft union, and unskilled workers belong to a Congress of Industrial Organizations union, of course. Skilled workers are trained by the union through apprenticeships. Unskilled workers are trained, minimally, by their foremen. And the CIO is a Communist front, say the bosses. That's the US classic labor history view.

46 points by petethomas 2y ago

Amazing how often "unskilled" is used to describe those whose skills are merely low on the social prestige scale, or who are ill-positioned to ensure that they & their peers get an oversized slice of the economic pie...

thaumasiotes 2y ago
Skills that are low on the prestige scale are unskilled. Skills that pay well automatically rate higher on the prestige scale. Skills that pay poorly are skills that can be easily provided by whoever, which is what "unskilled" means. I have lots of skills that would be incredibly valuable in an ant context; that doesn't mean they count as "skills" in a human context.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > Skills that pay well automatically rate higher on the prestige scale. This is pretty true. Though manual labor usually has less prestige at equal pay. > Skills that pay poorly are skills that can be easily provided by whoever This is much less true. There are plenty of skills that require a master's degree level of learning but also pay poorly.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > There are plenty of skills that require a master's degree level of learning but also pay poorly. There are many more of such masters than the market needs, so the pay drops until Demand meets Supply.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Of course. But low demand doesn't make them unskilled, right? I'm arguing against the idea that low pay/prestige makes them unskilled.
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        You could even have extremely skilled, moderately paid, but still relatively low prestige. And top of the trades pyramid go to this category. Think of specialised welders, were you need both years of expertise and probably quite a bit of aptitude... And the job is no way unskilled, but still would have less prestige in general population than some simpler job more of white collar type.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  There is also the case of the 'outcast' skills which are currently stigmatized. Unless there is a literal caste of people stuck doing these jobs they tend to ironically have to pay better. Porn actresses get paid in part for the 'reputational damage' as even today people are deeply silly/stupid about past work. Skilled labor in terms of "needs many years training" outcast skills are practically a hypothetical, and are what I would call 'high entropy' in the sense that it would take a lot of work and rare combinations to achieve. Practically an exercise for science fiction writers to depict say, a society where say heart surgery is viewed as deeply shameful yet still managed to perfect the art of heart surgery anyway.
WalterBright 2y ago
The more skilled a person is, the fewer such persons there are. The fewer there are, the more compensation they can demand. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  If you hold everything equal, then changes in supply work that way. But everything else is very far from equal across different types of job, enough to make supply-based calculations basically useless.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The market is very very good at price arbitrage. Far, far better than central economic price setting, as endless experience shows.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Seattle recently tried to set hourly rates for gig delivery drivers. It resulted in a collapse of that business, as prices went so high the demand dropped and the drivers made less.
    - analognoise 2y ago
      Is that true if the central planners had access to the digital data of Walmart, Costco, Target, Amazon, etc all at the same time? I wonder if the amount of data needed for efficient central planning is now here.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Yes, it always applies. Even to monopoly pricing.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        The mistake make with such data is that it can predict the future. At best, if the data is fairly accurate and complete it is only a good indicator of the past. The fundamental flaw of central planning at scale is that a small number of people will sustainably predict the future well enough to plan better than if they let individuals make decisions for themselves.

giraffe_lady 2y ago

No such thing as unskilled labor.

WalterBright 2y ago
The longer it takes to train someone to do a job, the more skilled it is.
missedthecue 2y ago
If anyone with a pulse can do it, it's unskilled. And I say this having worked those jobs for a number of years.
- nik282000 2y ago
  Being able to dig a ditch and being able to dig a ditch well are two different things. I've worked with people who can't do basic tasks after a decade at the same place.

notamy 2y ago

http://archive.today/p5LPz http://archive.today/p5LPz

WalterBright 2y ago

> an AI program can likely do that, too Hahaha. Yesterday I spent a half hour with Comcast's AI phone chatbot. No matter how I tried, it could not understand "cancel Hulu subscription." Finally, it connected me with a human who I said "cancel Hulu subscription" to, and he cancelled it. Mission Accomplished! But the AI chatbot was a total failure. I am preparing my presentation for DConf, and thought I'd try some relevant pictures. I asked it to "draw a square wheel". It drew a round one. I tried many variations, never got a square wheel, although grok insisted it was a square wheel. I now and then ask AI to write a function for me. The generated code always looks plausible, but there are always catastrophic bugs in them. The function will include tests (hooray!) but does not include answers to check the results against (boo!). It doesn't take long to realize that AI has no idea what you're asking for. AI has a loooong way to go.

ckcheng 2y ago
> Comcast's AI phone chatbot. No matter how I tried, it could not understand "cancel Hulu Seems working as intended? I’ve used a bank and Starbucks chatbots for customer service. Both times they seem so rudimentary and bad that it seemed anything could’ve been better, no LLM required. It took so much effort to get thru to a human. I have to believe it was designed that way, to fob off as many as possible.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The thought definitely occurred to me. Afterwards, it asked me to rate the bot from 0..10. I gave it a zero. I don't recall ever having a positive outcome with a customer service chatbot.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    A couple years ago, at $Job, I got a call from a Comcast "customer satisfaction" surveybot, after a frustrating interaction with Comcast's "press any button to accomplish more nothing" phone system. I gave the latter a very low rating. Our Comcast internet connection went out a couple minutes later.

freeone3000 2y ago

“Easily replacable” labor then

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 2y ago

> A person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage. There are different meanings to the word "worth". In the market place, your "worth" is how much value you can create for the person who pays you. Your worth to your family is something entirely different. It's like the innumerable definitions of the word "free". I've seen many people try to make points by conflating multiple such definitions. The article does this with "worth". It's a worthless(!) argument.

naming_the_user 2y ago
[dead]

kulahan 2y ago

This feels like a victim in search of a problem. It’s an economic term used to refer to people who are in easily-replaceable positions. You can drop someone in, give them on the job training, and they’ll have it mostly figured out in a couple weeks. This is not a judgement of the people working those jobs, and never has been really. Besides, call them literally whatever you want - that will become the new slur on the treadmill of euphemisms.

motohagiography 2y ago
imo the real economic danger is the regulatory response that institutes bureaucratic functions to create fake "jobs" in the form of mandatory human roles in companies that have nothing to do with the product or mission, stifling the whole economy with bureaucracy. the thing about automation is that it's a proxy for regulation and governance, and the "freeside" economy will still use a lot of manual work becuase nobody will want the administrative overhead of dealing with AI.

cortesoft 2y ago

My understanding is that an “unskilled” job has always meant a job that doesn’t require previous experience. It has nothing to do with how hard the job is or how valuable the work is, just whether or not it requires prior training or not.

antihipocrat 2y ago
To add to this, I think it's also whether prior training will make a substantial improvement in productivity.
strken 2y ago
Yeah, I always assumed it meant a job where the lowest level was accessible without training. Economists don't have a reason to distinguish between a job that will build skills versus one that won't, and I'm not sure the latter even exists. One example from the article was working as a caregiver. My brother worked as a disability carer while he was training to become an engineer. I was living with him at the time, and he started out with a baseline ability to care for others, no particular skills that an average person wouldn't have, and no qualifications other than a police check and a first aid certificate. He was essentially paid to drive people with mental disabilities around and not get frustrated with them. On the one hand, I get why someone with 20 years experience as a disability carer wouldn't want their job to be seen as something a uni student can pick up in a week. On the other hand, my brother could just go become a carer, so it's not entirely wrong.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
That doesn't encompass most of what people call unskilled labor. Even basic restaurant and big box store listings will typically ask for prior experience in restaurants or retail.
nradov 2y ago
The terms are a bit vague and prone to misinterpretation but economists usually refer to skilled labor jobs as those requiring certain mandatory credentials. Could be an educational degree or an occupational certificate or a government license. Some of those certificates or licenses also have minimum work experience requirements.

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

https://archive.is/p5LPz https://archive.is/p5LPz

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

loongloong 2y ago

"Unskilled labour" isn't the same as "unskilled worker" IMHO more appropriate would be "low skilled labour". We should use the correct term when describing jobs that require little specialised skill and separate them from the persons performing it (who may be very skillful in other non-related areas). If there is cultural stigma in using this term, should we sacrifice accuracy and succinctness in technical/professional discussions on related topics by dancing around with terminologies? If we "evolve" and use a new term that is not currently associated with the same stigma, will this neutral term eventually still be associated with the same stigma? If so, is it worth the effort and penalties (e.g. interim confusion) as a whole? I am genuinely curious about this, I think there are many good points on "both sides of the coin".

Animats 2y ago

Why, skilled workers belong to an American Federation of Labor craft union, and unskilled workers belong to a Congress of Industrial Organizations union, of course. Skilled workers are trained by the union through apprenticeships. Unskilled workers are trained, minimally, by their foremen. And the CIO is a Communist front, say the bosses. That's the US classic labor history view.